Image Credits
Uzi Varon

​Mariam Haji is where the story began drawing with coal, with silence, with rupture. Born in the heat of the Gulf, she was shaped by mythology and dissent, rooted in the layered soil of Bahrain.

​

Meri Helmi is where the journey unfolds among pine forests, relics, and the soft rhythm of motherhood. Her name means sea pearl a nod to both origin and transformation. She emerges from the waters of Bahrain, where pearls are born, and rests now in the tide of Scandinavian culture. Meri does not replace Mariam; she holds her, carries her, and continues her.

​

Trained at RMIT in Melbourne and shaped by a life across geographies, Dundee, Berlin, Paris; she inhabits a hybrid identity: Bahraini, Finnish, in-between. Dual names mirror dual states: belonging and estrangement, fragility and force. Her practice is a continuum: from body to environment, from blood to water, from rupture to repair. Whether through intimate drawings, wearable art, performance, or painting, her work asks:

​

How do we survive what’s been traditionally inherited?

What futures become possible when we compost the past?

This is not reinvention.

This is integration.

A mythology spoken in two voices.

A reclamation of both Origin and Evolution.