Possibilities emerge when a needle punctures through a surface, grazes, or pricks it. Lines dream up alternate realities—they loop in to slow down time, leaving nuances of meaning between folds of fabric and textiles stretched taut. Here time becomes a narrator guided by loops and lines, the in-and-out movement of threads, or in the act of piecing together assemblages. When layers of text, textile, images or paint overlap, meaning is sometimes made and sometimes lost in the shadow play of what is visible, and what is not. Conversations begin in these interstices. 

Borrowing its title from the 1997 painting by artist Agnes Martin, With My Back to the World asks the viewer to observe, feel and respond to the subtleties in art-making without seeking a cause or reason. This is an invitation to actively engage with process and the tactile conversations that emerge across different disciplines. While two artists might be experimenting with the same idea or technique, their journeys often take them in distinct directions. However, what we begin to discover is also a meshwork of interconnectedness—of both resonances and paradoxes. 

Whether it be embroidery, beadwork, woodblock printing, painting, sculpture, assemblage, or photography, there is much that transpires within the silent interstices of subtle gestures. Through the work of 12 contemporary female artists from Sri Lanka, the exhibition attempts to grasp what remains unsaid in the liminal spaces where materials are moulded, arranged, reshaped, and deconstructed. It is in these pauses, creases, and spaces in-between that our gaze is drawn into an object’s materiality, allowing us to ruminate on the intangible experiences of life.

Belgium-born Fabienne Francotte conflates social, emotional, and spiritual experiences in her work: the vivid narrative of an expatriate, teacher, and observer. The Thickness of Silence  are a series of disembodied lips that appear half open or half closed, as if caught in a gasp, between phrases or whispering quietly into the viewer’s ear. Using embroidery to create her unfinished lips, Fabienne meditatively engages with a back-and-forth tugging movement with her body. This dialogue between artist and material is integral to her process, as she probes and contemplates how we, as a society, speak about invisible wounds, hidden traumas and pervasive power structures in our communities.

Hansika Herath is a visual artist primarily working with the woodcut printing technique. Her woodcut prints highlight the rustic beauty and experiences of Sri Lanka’s villages. Her work is concerned with themes of nature and harmony which is driven by the recurrent female figure that is central to her work. Her works bring to light the characteristics of Sri Lanka’s predominantly matriarchal society.

Chathurika Jayani’s Dreamscapes consists of heavy-set colours and textures depicting a fantastical urban situation. While the artist’s work explores themes of urbanisation and city building, her painted structures, which could be described as ahistorical, often refer to the omnipresent and corrugated tiling sheets found on buildings across the country. Her approach is a conceptual one, where the architectural subject is observed and painted from several perspectives, including the literal and the abstract. Through these conceptual structures, Jayani participates in a global conversation about the current state of architecture and urban planning. For example, one may travel to several cities in different countries to find the same styles and types of buildings, sometimes produced by the same architectural studios. In some cases, it would make little difference which country one were to find themselves in; while spectacular in nature, the experience of these places may be all too similar. Underlying the majority of these works is a foreboding reflection on the relationship between urbanism and the environment. Whereas the idea of floating cities in the sky, spurred on by the speed of engineering and technology, may be awe-inspiring, Jayani’s paintings question the moral conduct of these extensive construction projects. What are the terms of their legacy?

Shaanea Mendis contemplates on intricate biological patterns and textures from nature in her pen, ink and watercolour renderings and experiments with oxidised iron stains, gold leaf and verdigris. Her work is concerned with the growing distance between humankind and nature and the quick succession in which forested areas are flattened to make way for urban landscapes. 

She describes her process of mark-making through pen and ink as the ‘spilling over of memories on paper or canvas’. Textural patterns found on old weathered trucks, fingerprints, skin, leaves, barks of trees or marks created by moss growth are but examples of mark-making in nature, which she observes before allowing it to manifest organically on paper. In her work with rust stains, Shaanea leaves mark-making to the chance interaction of iron with oxygen and water, allowing natural processes to determine the outcome.

Ashini Nanayakkara is a Sri Lankan photographer. Her research project Spatial Sense contemplates an urban future where physical and virtual worlds merge into a new dynamic and layered reality.

Using a combination of analog and digital photographic techniques, she plays with form, line, shape, and repetition to create complex geometric compositions of urban architecture. Drawing on the visual language of Constructivism, her work seeks to disorient traditional perceptions of space, place, and scale, pushing the medium’s capacity for abstraction. 

Ashini imagines urban spaces as sites of transience that hold us between two realities: present and future, physical and virtual. Through multiple exposures and dramatic light, she defamiliarises banal architectural structures such as balustrades, bollards, and windows to reveal urban spaces that could exist in both our physical world and cyberspace, often blurring the line between these two realities.

I remember my mother massaging our foreheads with tiger balm when we could not go to sleep. When working, I think a lot about how cardboard boxes, handkerchiefs, and garment fragments can inherit the value of heirlooms. This is why I cannot separate my history from the box that carries the balm and its identity as a throw-away item. All the objects I work with occupy a similar space. What could fuel them with meaning despite how dispensable they are is foundational to my work. Like the motion of my mother’s massage, I use patterns repetitively, making intricate lattice structures that are layered with oil pastel and paint, gouache, colored pencil, and graphite. I use needles to scrape and expose layers below. The needles are also used to embroider and crochet in places where I cut out negative spaces. The subtractive and additive role needles play invoke the duality of meaninglessness yet preciousness that I aim to capture with my work. When I look up at the sky, I recall the red Colombo horizon after an explosion or walking underneath a snow-filled cloudy night in Chicago. The softness of the sky and the many shapes it takes reminds me of handkerchiefs. I use the Islamic architectural technique, ablaq, which alternates light and dark stones, to envelop spaces. The diagonal grid that underlays the work alludes to the warp and weft of woven fabric. Geometric elements are interwoven with memories to create an interior feeling space and an exterior physical space. Handkerchiefs are malleable and I coat them in chalk gesso so they become crisp and brittle like papadams. Mirroring my mother’s labor, I massage layers of material into them which cracks the gesso and softens the surface. The cyclical process of soft, hard, and then soft again, like the sky, calls on the multiplicity that is inherent to my work. Colombo and Chicago. Additive and subtractive. Here but elsewhere. Inside and out. Ephemeral but infused with love.

Through the digital reproduction and superimposition of ancient cosmological cartographies with watercolour paintings, Anoli Perera reflects on ideas of ‘pilgrimages’, parallel landscapes and sacred routes people construct. The works created for Tale of Two Cities considers the experiential and emotional rootedness of journeys taken by pilgrims that supersede the boundaries present in cartographic maps. It deliberates on the claim pilgrims make to geographies and histories, beyond that of their homelands, as they engage with regions that exist in their imagination, beliefs, and interpretations of the world.

Anoli Perera is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores themes of feminism, history, identity, colonialism, and post-colonial anxieties. She incorporates a broad range of media in her practice such as photography, installation, painting, book art, and bricolage. 

Inspired by perspective in urban architectural spaces, Sumi Perera uses hybrid printmaking techniques to explore the interplay of geometric forms, shapes, and lines. Her work is  often interactive and collaborative and open to transformation. She  works by combining a range of printmaking techniques such as etching, aquatint, drypoint, monoprint, chine-colle, collagraphs, mezzotint, lithography, kiln-fired screenprint decals along with stitch and Computer Numerical Controlled methods such as laser-cutting, engraving, and sandblasting among others. 

Belgian artist Saskia Pintelon who has been practicing in Sri Lanka since the 1980s is an observant whose patchwork of collages, studio photographs, and repurposed artworks she made over the years ruminate on a society and its people who are constantly forced to change by the shifts in their environment.The themes in her work are related to age, beauty, gender, internet use, love, obsession with fitness, isolation, loneliness and the balance between the public and the private self. Pintelon provides us a kaleidoscope of the physical and the emotional in her characteristic tongue-in-cheek approach as she subtracts, extracts and adds to give us a glimpse into what makes us really human. 

Saskia Pintelon is at heart a figurative painter who periodically inclines towards abstraction, text-based work, and collages. Inspired by local and universal issues, politics, and day-to-day concerns, her body of work interprets the collective human experience, environment and the cycle of life with intimate and personal preoccupations.  

Beyond the straightforward realistic documentation of a female prison cell, these walls and the fencing represent individual and the collective memories and histories of the challenges that are imposed on women by family, society, religious beliefs and the state. 

Hema Shironi’s wide-ranging artistic practice combines embroidery, mythological imagery, bricolage, and installation to inquire concepts of cultural identity. Her work is deeply rooted in observance of the history of colonization, civil war, displacement and migration, which she highlights through personal stories and experiences of living in Sri Lanka. As a child, her family often moved from one place to another and she eventually found herself questioning the bonds that communities and individuals make. Her work is driven by the nostalgia of the numerous places she has called home and how each community belonging to those places grapples with concerns of language, culture, memory, myth, gender, and equality.

Hema Shironi’s gentle delineations of the house as a site of safety and of loss have been a significant journey in her work and for those who have witnessed her progress. The house as an embodiment of shelter and a repository of the human values which reside in it has consumed her. The house and the home that it once was, moved with her, recalling and documenting times of conflict. But the artist transcends pain and invents ways of healing. These are contained in the signs which mark the new pathways of recovery and rejuvenation. Shironi begins to revel in her triumphs as she goes into uncharted territories searching for everyday emblems which she can reuse and transform. Each stage of her travels are marked by a surprising twist: sometimes a bundle of belongings, sometimes a fragment of apparel. Thus, her narrative moves from material to material, from medium to medium mirroring her account of remembered experience. Memory evokes a body of images which she gathers and quite literally threads together to make them universal in meaning. The darkness of trauma is set aside as Hema Shironi’s work speaks of the persistence of life: delicate poetic trails of marks and new forms of the lightness of being.

Anoma Wijewardene is a multidisciplinary artist working with mixed media, oils, sculpture, digital, video, olfactory and performance art, and has recently begun experimenting with NFTs. Her works are often suggestive, invite multiple interpretations, and reflect the human condition. Her trilingual multimedia exhibitions focus on regeneration,inclusivity and unifying harmony.

Anoma's vivid and layered works encapsulate a search for renewal, inclusivity and harmony in our turbulent world. Her process of work which involves  tearing and cutting up her paintings to reconstruct them reflects on how  fractured and unrelated entities can come together in different ways to be made into a whole. Anoma’s work celebrates diversity and invites us to find unifying harmony and solace through a process of deconstruction and reconstruction.