A SIMPLER LIFE [2020-2021]

What do we hold on to when the place we come from exists only in memory?

In ‘A Simpler Life’, the artist retraces the contours of memory as a way of returning home. Working from old family photographs, the series reconstructs an intimate world of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents — those who shaped the earliest sense of belonging. These recollections, softened by distance and nostalgia, bridge a life once lived in Sri Lanka with the dissonance of migration and reinvention in Austria.

Each portrait carries a symbolic object - a keepsake of emotion, time, or consciousness. Through the transition from painting to silk embroidery, memory is transformed from the ephemeral into the tactile, from the imagined into the material. The embroideries, realised in collaboration with Reyas Ali in Kolkata, India, embody a dialogue between personal narrative and collective craftsmanship.

Drawing upon ancient Sri Lankan embroidery traditions once used to record lineage and heritage - often done in Kolkata - the artist reclaims thread as a vessel of remembrance and tradition. The works stand as woven testaments to the enduring power of memory - tender, distorted, and redemptive - stitching together fragments of a past that continues to shape the present.

In collaboration with Reyas Ali, Kolkata, India.