Stitching together memories of war and her grandmother’s stories
Artist Hema Shironi blends a legacy from her mother and grandmother – embroidery with the travails of growing up with the civil war, when they changed houses more than 16 times within Matale town alone, due to being part of the minority, her mother a Hindu Tamil and her father a Roman Catholic Tamil.
In her new exhibition, titled Families ‘Not’ in the List, her tortured embroidery (looking incomplete, destroyed or threadbare) and jagged patchworks speak of displacement, migration, colonisation and horrors of the war.
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 was born in Kandy, moved to Matale, and after the war, in 2010, her family decided to shift to ancestral land in Kilinochchi.
In her early thirties now, Hema grew up with her seamstress mother and grandmother constantly stitching floral patterns into clothes, so it was easy to take up what she calls “drawing with the needle” after her BFA from the Jaffna University.
Hema Shironi (pic by Priyanka Samaraweera) and right, one of her works
Her first works of embroidery were minute, mostly 1cmx 1cm as after graduation, she was working as a designer at Kolam Jaffna designing organic dried fabrics, jewellery, bags, sarees and had little time for art. It was during the COVID lockdown that she could give serious attention to her studio work.
Hema was inspired to embroider mostly by bedtime stories by her grandmother, who was rather close to her. “I used to ask her questions; why did you move from here to there? What happened during this period? Her story inspired me and later also stories from the society at large.”
Hema’s work is striking. There is a hand stitched cloth depicting half of a Sri Lankan flag, incomplete with threads hanging. It took one and a half months to complete, says Hema and shows how the map is ‘fading’ because of our own misdemeanours but also Hema’s own confusion as to where she belongs, with the mixed heritage of her parents, further complicated by having a Sinhala Buddhist husband.
Another work is a patchwork that depicts an abandoned, empty children’s park and a crowded cemetery. “After the civil war many a children’s park was built in the afflicted areas, but there were no children to play there — they were all dead or their parents couldn’t take them to play.”
Hema is grateful to a family who allowed her to dabble in art from an early age. Having done her MFA at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore, her work has been featured at the Critical Zones conceived by ZKM, Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2022), Colomboscope (2019 and 2022), Matara Art Festival (2023) and the 13th Taipei Biennial: Small World, hosted by the Taipei Fine Arts Museum.
Hema has also completed an Artist Residency at House of Kal, Sri Lanka (2021).
Hema Shironi’s new exhibition, titled Families ‘Not’ in the List, is now on from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, Colombo and will continue until September 5.
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