Remember to Breathe : Shaanea Mendis

The act of healing begins at a cellular level, in an unseen choreography of regeneration and renewal. The wounded body signals for help and the cells respond with deliberate precision. New cells proliferate; damaged cells are destroyed in an act of self sacrifice allowing for healthy cells to emerge. This process is cyclical and intuitive – a biological rhythm that finds resonance in Shannea Mendis's artistic practice –  layered, meditative and in tune to the need for reconnection. 

In Remember to Breathe the artist reimagines a space for repair as she traverses through grief and loss – seeking renewal. After the passing of her father, Shaanea Mendis allowed grief in its rawest form to guide her practice—working from a place not yet tempered by resolution but driven by urgency. Through this impulse, her imagined organic structures, or ‘cellscapes’ emerge through accretion, informed by gentle observations of mark-making on natural and industrial surfaces –  the grain of skin, the bark of trees, the tarnish of metal and the venations on leaves. These visual impressions coalesce into dense biomorphic terrains that are at once expansive and intimate drawing the viewer gradually to a state of intuitive contemplation.   

Each artwork carries the residue of lived experience, holding the weight of transition both geographical and emotional. The cities Mendis has called home – Colombo, Mumbai, Singapore and Copenhagen – layer into her compositions like sediment, surfacing as the urban skyline amid the cellular forms and neural junctions. These landscapes hint at both a sense of rootedness and dislocation, evocative of tension between personal history and the places we inhabit. The density of the forms reflect not only the complexity of urban life but also the internal architecture of our being as we seek clarity, consideration and the space to simply exist.

Unlike the transparent cells and organelles of our bodies, Mendis saturates her watercolours with vivid hues of green, yellow and pink, creating a biotic structure where mythos and memory converge. Mendis embraces the fluidity and unpredictability of watercolours, letting it seep, blur and bloom in a reflection of the non-linear nature of healing. The organic flows are interspersed by flecks of gold leaf, the luster a subtle nod to the entrenched systems of power and value that privilege urban expansion at the cost of environmental degradation. Here, Mendis invokes the aesthetics of lush interdependent ecosystems while provoking the viewer to unravel their apparent harmony. The works raise insistent questions around sustainability, urbanity and illusion – what lies beneath the surface of such intricate beauty?

In this approach, the artist's ecological critique unfolds not as a didactic message but a bid to look closer, sensing the subterranean tension. Through this act of deciphering and decoding the dense forests and skylines, Mendis’s cellscapes allow us to take a pause in a world that seldom allows for it. These sensibilities carry into I am a Work in Progress, a series of fibrous sculptures that emulate the structures of her watercolour renderings. Using a finger knitting technique taught to her by her children, Mendis constructs textured neural networks, allowing the meditative slowness and deliberation of the act to attune her to resonances of grief, loss and generational trauma.  

Remember to Breathe is at once a personal invocation and a collective reminder to those navigating grief, uncertainty and the weight of everyday survival. In an age of polluted air, climate anxiety and societal disconnection – where breath itself is in peril –  this showcase also becomes a political and ecological plea. In a shared space of  stillness Mendis asks us to consider that we are not isolated beings but part of a larger, interconnected ecology as each mark and breath becomes bound by the invisible filaments of care and understanding.