Adrift: Anushiya Sundaralingam

Piercing the canvas with a deafening silence, the memory of departure shapes Anushiya Sundaralingam’s  body of work, unraveling itself like an odyssey that parallels the turbulences contained within life itself. Adrift wades through the quagmire of migration prompted by civil unrest with a poetic lens. The artist’s works are grounded in a deeply personal experience of leaving behind her homeland amidst the political instability in Sri Lanka. Anushiya’s training as a printmaker seeps into her practice, as she shifts between collage, photography and painting. The evocative language inherent to the medium imbues her work with an immediacy and tension, underpinning the grief and hope of people living in conflict zones across continents.

The line, dominant in Anushiya’s work, appears throughout as a missing horizon, or an anchor that seeks landing in a fathomless ocean. It becomes a thread connecting the artist to her community and roots through which she retraces her steps back to her cultural homeland. Gestures of daily rituals that carry the hum of shared experiences become a tool in the artist’s process of meaning-making. 

Drawing from a rich lexicon of South Asian imagery, boats become a metaphor for departures and arrivals in Anushiya’s practice. Strips cut from medicine packets are woven together like palmyra leaf baskets to resemble a skeletal form. The material’s very precarious link to survival harkens to the fragility of existence.  It is an imagination where the perils of the journey, connoted by a boat, become synonymous with life.

Anushiya’s process is steeped in language where meaning is created through metaphoric associations. Thus, the delicate and breakable form of the boat, resembling a ribcage, becomes a cradle for dreams and a vessel that ferries one to a distant land. The boat and the body become one and the same as it serves as a locus for memories, emotions and psyche. Throughout the series, vessels appear in various states, either capsized or caught in mid-sea. Its fragmented form, strewn across the canvas at unpredictable angles, breaks conventions of compositional harmony to underscore a restless disquiet. The stillness of the water and the blackness that permeates bring forth a despair of suspended mobility. Arriving at the shore, they silently reach towards hope amidst uncertainty. 

Repeating itself like an echo, this body of work becomes a witness to countless narratives - a caravanserai that carries collective histories of transit. Anushiya Sundaralingam’s relentless experiments seek to alleviate the weight of these experiences through resonances shared across time, place and communities.