Adrift: Anushiya Sundaralingam

Piercing the canvas with a deafening silence, the memory of departure shapes Anushiya Sundaralingam’s contemplations on estrangement. 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 for Northern Ireland amidst the political instability in Sri Lanka. The body of work unravels like an odyssey, paralleling the turbulences contained within life itself. The evocative language inherent to printmaking seeps into the artist’s work even as she shifts between collage, photography and painting with incessant consistency.

Anushiya Sundaralingam is a Sri Lankan multidisciplinary artist based in Belfast. Working across a wide range of media—including printmaking, mixed media, installations, drawing, sculpture, textiles, painting, and performance— Anushiya uses fluidity, texture and colour to reflect the intricacies of belonging. Relocating to Northern Ireland from Sri Lanka in the 1980s, the artist’s practice examines notions of identity-making, lost cultures and displacement.

Anushiya graduated with a degree in Fine & Applied Arts from the University of Ulster in 1998. Her work has been exhibited at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2024); Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin, Ireland (2017); One Church Street Gallery, Buckinghamshire, UK (2013); Belfast Print Workshop, Belfast, Northern Ireland (2014); and the University of Jaffna, Jaffna, Sri Lanka (2025). Anushiya’s work is featured in several notable collections including Queen’s University, Belfast, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast and the National College of Art, Dublin. Additionally, her work has been published in The A-Z of Conflict (2016) by Raking Leaves Publications and Beneath the Surface published by the C.R.E.A.T.E. Project. She is an associate member of the Royal Ulster Academy.