ARTISTKamala Vasuki

Kamala Vasuki (Born 1966) hails from Jaffna, and settled in Batticaloa, Sri Lanka.

She was trained by A. Mark a pioneering artist and art teacher who popularised modern art practices in northern Sri Lanka. Having had her first solo exhibition in 1989 in Jaffna, in spite of the debilitating war that was underway at that time in the north and east of Sri Lanka, she is the only female visual artist who has sustained an art practice while continuing to live through the war.

Vasuki’s artistic technique is vibrant and has changed over time, consists of landscape art, sketches, wash drawings, pastel paintings, cartoons and installations. When looked at together it is possible to trace journeys through technique, style and colour palette in her work. This can be artistically interpreted as reflexive of the context in which she was making art and there remains validity and truth to that interpretation.

She drew on any paper she could find and hungrily grabbed any material she found and learned to make art with it. In the context of war when art materials were close to impossible to obtain, Vasuki worked with any paper, colours or other material she could find with the enormous encouragement of this mode of art-making from her teacher and mentor who she and others lovingly refer to as Mark Master. She made sculptures out of plastic pens and soap. The soap sculptures were eventually used by those in her household when soap was no longer available in Jaffna due to the war related embargo.

Her collective art work, with communities of women from different parts of the island often takes materials from everyday lives of women such as fabric, saris, objects, flowers, grains etc. to tell their own stories.

She has mentored almost two generations of visual artists and others who are interested in all forms of artistic and literary work for social change. She has been an integral part of forming and sustaining many cultural groups in Batticaloa including ‘Artists for non-violent living’ , ‘Third eye’ a group of activists engaged in preserving local knowledge, ‘Padinikal’ an all women cultural group that was affiliated to the Suriya women’s Development Centre and ‘Samathai’ the only all women parai drumming group on the island.

She was a student of Vembadi Girls High School, Jaffna, graduated with a BSc in Biological Sciences from the University of Jaffna and completed a Masters degree in Human Rights and Democratization at the University of Sydney.

Having had her first solo exhibition in 1989 in Jaffna, Vasuki has had individual and group exhibitions in different parts of Sri Lanka and abroad, including Nepal, Australia and the Netherlands.

Vasuki’s art practice is deeply grounded in her life experiences and her feminist perspective on the world. Now almost 35 years later since she began making art, her work bears witness to the histories she has lived through.