Born in Beirut in 1995, Nour Huda is a Lebanese artist currently based in the UK.
Nour’s painterly work explores narrative-driven themes, reflecting the emotional landscape of the human experience. Through layered symbolism, textures, moody palettes, and evocative imagery, her paintings invite reflection on memory, transformation, and the quiet tension between reality and imagination.
Drawing inspiration from her cultural heritage, music, and literary works, the paintings insight a continuous dialogue between internal reflection and external influence, translating personal experiences and universal emotions into art form. Each work is intended to evoke feeling, provoke thought, and linger in the viewer’s memory.
Her recent work has been focused on personal themes from her life and upbringing in her home country, Lebanon. These personal narratives connect with broader reflections on identity, memory, grief, conflict, and belonging.
Nour’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions and publications, and has found collectors namely across Europe, USA, and the Middle East.
www.nourhuda.com
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Unparallel
In this self-portrait, I explore the fragile space between life and death; not as opposing states, but as parallel realities that can suddenly intersect.
The face emerges partially from a dense, black surface composed of oil paint, mixed media, and miniature soldiers. The figure appears suspended between being buried and being born, obscured and revealed, present and absent. The darkness is both physical and psychological: earth, ash, memory, destruction, and the unknown.
Coming from Lebanon, where histories of conflict, displacement, survival, and loss are deeply embedded in the landscape and collective consciousness, the miniature soldiers carry an additional weight. Reduced to small objects within the material surface, they suggest the systems and forces that shape–and sometimes interrupt–individual lives. Yet among these remnants, a face insists on appearing.
The work is also deeply personal. After the sudden loss of my husband, the boundary between life and death became something I experienced not as a distant philosophical idea or a third-person’s point of view, but as an abrupt collapse of one reality into another. Someone can be here, and then no longer be here, while their presence continues to occupy the same physical and emotional world. Grief itself becomes a kind of parallel existence: the living continue forward while simultaneously inhabiting a reality shaped by the absence of someone who was once inseparable from it.
In this sense, the portrait becomes a space where seemingly parallel conditions (life and death, presence and absence, emergence and burial, memory and matter) are no longer held apart. They intersect within the same surface.
The circular format reinforces this idea of continuity rather than linearity. There is no clear beginning or end, only a face appearing through a field of darkness. The work asks what happens when the boundaries we understand as fixed begin to collapse, and whether something can exist simultaneously on both sides of a divide.
Rather than depicting death itself, the work considers the strange state of being alive alongside it: looking through darkness, carrying what has been lost, and continuing to emerge.