Sachintha Nirmani transforms granite such that it becomes imbued with softness. Meeting the resistance of the material with a gentleness that releases its once-molten form, her sculptures embody resilience not as hardness, but as vulnerability and the capacity to remain tender under pressure.

The weightlessness of light casts a tender glance in Liz Fernando's photo series. Photographing the interiors of rooms where lovers meet briefly, she captures what remains after. The soft imprint of intimacy on sheets, on light, on air. These are spaces that the world often meets with an unkind gaze; Liz's lens refuses that judgment. In its place, she offers warmth, asking us to look with the same gentleness that lingers in the room itself.

Anushiya Sundarlingam’s practice is grounded in a deeply personal experience of leaving behind her homeland amidst the political instability in Sri Lanka. Like disembodied limbs writhing in pain, the braided hair is infused with life as it reaches back for the roots that once anchored it. The line, dominant in Anushiya’s work,  becomes a thread connecting the artist to her community and roots through which she retraces her steps back to her cultural homeland.

Coursing through oceanic waters, red, green, and yellow rice packets disperse like polyps in tropical currents, leaving a trail that echoes the influx of immigrants on western shores. Chudamani Clowes reclaims agency through a deliberate disavowal of orderliness and artistic conventions. Unravelling itself like an untamed landscape, Chudamani’s vibrant visual style offers a counterpoint to colonial imaginations.

Invisible threads of mycelia, potent with the possibility of sustaining and creating ecosystems anew, gently contest inherited architectures of control in Dumiduni Illangasinghe’s practice. Vermillion red, a colour synonymous with the feminine divine in the South Asian region, anchors Dumiduni’s reimagination of nature, culture and sisterhood as mushrooms spring to life.   

Through a process akin to meditation, Shaanea Mendis quietens the dizzying clamour of cities and the dreary sense of isolation it brings. Working deliberately with watercolours, she contains fluid colour within organic, nature-inspired forms; her practice becomes an act of resistance, reclaiming time through stillness.

Tenderness becomes an ointment to harrowing memory in Hema Shironi's practice. Working on fabric with thread, she conjures images that carry the quality of a child's drawings, full of feeling. Through her work, Hema returns to homes that witnessed loss, but also held the warmth of laughter and togetherness. 

Resistance encoded in the body gives way to arrested motion. Carrying the weight of myriad emotions, the bodies in Fabienne Francotte's work activate inert spaces. Caught in an unstructured choreography, neither fully still nor surrendering to movement, teasing motion without conceding it. There is something wilfully unpredictable in this suspension, as though each body resists the legibility of gesture, refusing to resolve into meaning too easily.