Billboards from the End of the World
2024
assorted materialsvariable dimensions
These works incorporate a variety of collected ephemera from the era of global capitalism, including but not limited to: food and consumer product packaging, industrial packaging and materials, homemade religious pamphlets, postal/shipping materials, electrical wires, clothing and textile waste, metal scraps, bureaucratic forms, and magazine clippings. These collected materials are placed in conversation with more personal artefacts centred around migration and maternal lineage. Text is also paramount to my practice: often I incorporate my native English, as well as languages of which I have a character-based/symbolic understanding but in which I lack true comprehension, like Sinhala and Arabic.
For the past year I have been engaged in the creation of an ongoing series employing these three strands. In these works, I hope to narrativize the confusion of ethnographic remains in the wake of a) global plutocratic oligarchies and their collapse and b) the physical migration thus induced. The phrase included in the piece below, කොහෙද යන්නෙ? මල්ලේ පොල්! (Kohede yanne? Malle pol!), is a Sinhala phrase which directly translates to ‘Where are you going? Coconuts in the basket!’ and is used when someone’s response has nothing to do with the question asked: to me, an apt representation of the absurd political conditions under which we have perhaps always lived. Materially, as seen in flag for new nations (for Luis) this series imagines the visual practices of a society obeying a prehistoric impulse to record and symbolise their existence but with no memory of raw material, trading instead in image, symbol, and waste products as the new fabric of the natural world.
කොහෙද යන්නෙ? මල්ලේ පොල්! (Kohede yanne? Malle pol!)
from series ‘Billboards from the End of the World’
Shown at Woman Made Gallery, 26th International Open
2024
oil pastel, coloured pencil, encaustic wax, acrylic, beetroot juice, foil wrapper, yarn, magazine pages, newsprint, London map guidebook (index pages), consumer packaging (tights), rose petal on scrap wood15.75 x 43.3 in.
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flag for new nations (for Luis)
from series ‘Billboards from the End of the World’
2024
acrylic, sardine can, anklet, film strips, pearl beads, tissue paper, candy wrapper, costume jewel, clothing hanger ribbon, assorted consumer packaging (sticker package), produce bag netting, shell, commercial waste bag, magazine page, ink, metal on wood8.3 x 17.55 x 0.25 in.
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