Two Monsoons
Watercolour on A3 Paper • 2024 - Ongoing
Whether witchy rituals or unknown superstitions, the women extrude tactile knowledge from their environment, through pleasure, pain and/or disgust.
Cool Drinks, Short Eats and the Curve of a Punctuation Mark
Watercolour on A4 Paper • 2023
Unknown women, with their skin pigmented like Hindu goddesses enact absurd transgressions against their environment. Indifferent to tangible results, they explore the boundary between self and exterior. They abandon social conventions, and traditional / familial relationships to cultural material in lieu of an intimate and sensorial one.
Gathering Cirrus
Ceramics and fabric • 2023
I often engage in reshaping/reconstruction of myself with the aim of considering the dissonance between my awareness of my own identity and a wider understanding of self. I examine my body, often through the clay, which reappears disjointed and incomplete in my installations. Through this ritual performance, I arrive at a self-awareness that is non-linguistic, “arational” and similar to Bergsonian introspection – embodied.
Stamps on Coarse Skin
Ceramics, rattan, textiles, wood, paper • 2022
Taking a traditionally masculine practice of sculpture on stone/wood - a materially reductive process - and by re-configuring it in the more feminine language of textile manipulation/sewing - a materially additive process - the work explores relationships between objects and people - in movement, in reformulation - romanticized and exotified.
Classic Example
Ceramics • 2021
Classic Example is a series of ceramic t-shirts with prints of objects on display at the British Museum. The cultural objects were chosen from the home country of the business owner where the ceramics were displayed. A story of movement, rupture and fictionalisation of the cultural objects and the migrant bodies from the disconnected combination of intent, location and translation.
Touring Permutations
Mixed Media • Installation views • 2020
Touring Permutations examines the intersection between our prevalent tourist practices and the fictionalization of culture in “exotic” developing countries, leading to the obfuscation of cultural artifacts. I examine my relationship with cultural tourism, particularly evident during my visits to my country of birth (Sri Lanka). I draw on our expectations of “enrichment through travel” and the meaning that cultural objects can have when their original context is removed and displayed in an intercultural setting.
Tailored Breath
Mixed Media • Installation views • 2020
Tailored Breath is a collaborative exhibition between Marc Étienne and Michella Perera. In this installation they explore their relationship to rest and relaxation. Informed by the tertiary economic sector of service based industry and their observations of social life through relaxation, we have created a humorous response to our obsession with representing “a good time.”