Natalia Kekelia

(b. 2005, Poti, Georgia)

 

Natalia is a Georgian visual artist and printmaker based in Poti. She is currently completing her Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Art at Ilia State University, where her practice focuses primarily on printmaking.

 

Working with etching, aquatint, drypoint, mezzotint, linocut, woodcut, and monotype, her practice describes the relationship between memory, place, and everyday experience. Her works often draw from photographic archives, observations of her surroundings, and fragments of lived experience, transforming familiar scenes into atmospheric and emotionally layered images. Through the slow and tactile process of printmaking, these references are transformed rather than simply reproduced, allowing memories to take on new visual forms.

 

Growing up in the coastal city of Poti has strongly influenced her visual language. The sea, shoreline, domestic spaces, family archives, and traces of local life frequently appear in her work. Documentary references become starting points for reflecting on belonging, memory, nostalgia, and the passage of time. Although her works often begin with her own experiences and memories, they are not limited to her personal story, she demonstrates how individual memories can carry feelings and stories that are shared by many people.

 

Childhood, family, summer, home, and familiar landscapes can become collective emotional experiences, even when the specific memories belong to different people. Through this perspective, personal imagery becomes a way of speaking about something broader: the feeling of remembering a place, a time, or a way of life that may be familiar to others in their own different forms. Her work therefore moves between the personal and the shared, allowing viewers to connect their own memories and experiences to the scenes she presents.

 

Rosemarine

 

As children, we sat in the trunk of the car - for us, it was a place of freedom. We visited every beach until we found the quietest spot, far from the crowds, where we would set up our umbrella. After burying one another in the sand and building sandcastles, we raced across the scorching shore beneath the blazing sun.

 

Our mother taught us how to listen to the seashells we collected. She said that a shell is part of the sea and never forgets its sound. Whenever I longed for home, I only had to hold a shell to my ear and hear the familiar murmur of the waves.

 

Light scattered into thousands of restless sparks. The surface of the sea shimmered until it became too bright to look at. It was too alive to ignore. It was hot. We ran across the burning sand without direction. Nothing held its shape for long. The ground burned - not gently, but instantly. The moment our feet touched the hot sand, we leapt. Movement had become instinct.

 

Voices remained without bodies. Laughter reaches me like an echo: endless, overlapping moments, scattered into fragments that leave their trace. In that overwhelming light, everything stretches endlessly, everything is felt at once, and then suddenly disappears.

 

These fragments come from a family photo album documenting our summers by the sea in 2010. The series grows from a family tradition, but the memories it carries are not only my own. Scenes of summer, family, the sea, and returning to the same places each year can belong to many childhoods. Through these images, a personal archive becomes a space for shared memories and familiar feelings.

 

The title *Rosemarine* is a nickname inspired by the names of my grandparents, Rose and Omar.

 

Rosemary has traditionally been associated with memory, remembrance, love, and fidelity, and is also a plant often found growing in coastal landscapes. The title gains another layer of meaning through its linguistic origin. The word derives from the Latin *ros marinus*, literally meaning "dew of the sea." Its pale blue flowers evoke sea mist and dew.

 

Over time, the word evolved through several forms:

 

ros marinus - rosmarinus - rosmarine - rosemary

 

For me, the title brings together the two central elements of the series: memory and the sea - something remembered, something belonging to the past, yet still carrying the sound, atmosphere, and feeling of home.