Anoma Wijewardene

Broken bowls, mended in gold. In 2019, in a palazzo on the Grand Canal, Anoma Wijewardene gave a room over to the idea behind kintsugi, the Japanese practice of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold so that the fracture is neither hidden nor mourned but made part of the object’s worth. She titled the installation ‘Kintsugi’, threaded through it the poetry of Romesh Gunesekera, music by Sharon Smith and the scent of cinnamon, and set it down as an argument for unity in a polarised world. To understand why a Sri Lankan painter should build a shrine to mended things and carry it to Venice, you have to follow her back through thirty years abroad and a country learning to live after a long war.

She was born in Sri Lanka in 1951, into the family of Ray Wijewardene, the engineer and inventor who sailed for Ceylon at the 1968 Olympics; making and independence were the household air. She trained abroad, taking a foundation at the College of Art in Loughborough in 1970 and then a BA in 1973 and an MA in 1974 at Central Saint Martins in London, and she stayed on for three decades as a designer and artist, with work that reached the cover of Vogue. She could have remained a London name. Instead she brought her studio home, and painting, more than design, became the place where she worked out what she wanted to say.

What she wanted to say gathered around repair. By her own account her canvases and installations circle isolation, transformation, reconciliation and healing, and in the later work the survival of the earth itself: layered, dense surfaces of boats, rivers, figures and pathways, and rooms that fold in poetry, science and scent. She has made the case for coexistence and diversity in a place that has known the opposite, and she has made it as an appeal to the senses rather than a lecture, which is why the mended bowl suited her so well.

The record followed the conviction. Her first major solo show, ‘Quest’, opened at the National Art Gallery in Colombo in 2006; she took part in the inaugural Colombo Art Biennale in 2009; ‘Deliverance’ came to the Saskia Fernando Gallery in 2012, and ‘EarthLines’ in 2016, the year she also showed in Sotheby’s Hong Kong exhibition ‘One Belt, One Road’. Then Venice: ‘Kintsugi’ at the European Cultural Centre in the Palazzo Bembo, a collateral exhibition of the 58th Biennale. By the reckoning of the Sri Lankan press it made her the first Sri Lankan solo artist to show during the Biennale since the 43 Group stood in the Arsenale in 1955. Her work is held in private and public collections across Britain, the United States, the Emirates, Japan, India, Malaysia and Singapore.

The gold, in kintsugi, runs exactly where the break is. That is the whole of Anoma’s argument, held in one image: the fracture is not the end of the thing, and the seam, filled and lit, can be the most valued part of what is left.