I grew up as Maryam Aljanahi in Bahrain. When I went to school, there was an art department with a nice teacher, where I preferred to spend my days than in the classroom. The teacher had secretly submitted one of my works to a competition, which I won. The judges thought that my painting was the only one where it was noticeable that I had done it myself, and that I didn't get help from my parents, says Meri-Helmi.
And it was there that her career began. She had her first exhibition at the Bahrain Art Society when she was 16 years old. Since then she has studied design and art in Scotland and Australia and currently operates in Finland.
Meri-Helmi has always found it difficult to put a price on her art because it is part of one. She wants to draw attention to artists who need to stop doing things for free and instead plan for the future, with retirement etc. Because being a foreign artist while being a mother of two children is not always a bed of roses.
Her works have gone from knowing exactly how they should look to just starting and seeing where she ends up. Her paintings have transitioned from coming from the brain to coming from the heart. But a strongly recurring theme is intercultural hybridity, which is very much about belonging everywhere at the same time as nowhere, something very important to Meri-Helmi.
“Right now I am working with intercultural hybridity. I have upcoming exhibitions at Luckan in Helsinki in June and in Suomen in the autumn. Then I also to have an exhibition in Bahrain and next year one in Paris. The upcoming exhibition in June is a collaboration between me and two Finnish artists: Tarja Sirkiä and Aila Aho. They have lived 5 years in Abu Dhabi and 10 years in Bahrain respectively, their children are born there so these three artists have a lot in common. The name of the exhibition is "Remembering". It is called that because it is based on memories, memories from moments where they experienced intercultural hybridity”, says Meri-Helmi.
Her work is currently at the Bahrain National Museum. She also has a permanent exhibition at the Bahrain National Theater, where you can find, among other things a painting that is 4x4 meters in size. It shows very well what intercultural hybridity really is. It is very important to her because of the message and because she made it with her daughter when she was 3 months old.
Meri-Helmi intends to leave Finland sometime in the future and move to a bigger city where the support and interest for international artists is greater. Where she can experience even more in the world of art. Since art is constantly changing, she believes that moving to a big city would still affect her art, but she would still stick to intercultural hybridity.
Meri-Helmi loves to create art. She feels that there are moments of freedom when she creates art and that creativity just flows. But there are also moments that are the exact opposite and that it can then be really difficult. But in the end, it has become a finished painting despite the emotional roller coaster.