Anushiya Sundaralingam

In 2024, after thirty years away, Anushiya Sundaralingam went back to Jaffna, and the return did not close the wound it was meant to close. The visit, made on a British Council grant, gave her the material for a body of work she called ‘Fragmented Crossings’, and the title is exact: she came home to find that home had become another country, and that the crossing between the two could be made only in pieces. By her own account she still feels like a refugee, and that sentence, spoken by a woman who has lived four fifths of her adult life in Northern Ireland, is the whole of her subject.

She was born in Jaffna, in the Tamil north, and left Sri Lanka at the age of twenty-two, at the height of a civil war that made her city one of its front lines. She reached Northern Ireland in 1995, took a foundation year at Oxford and then a degree in fine and applied arts at the University of Ulster, completed in 1998, and she has worked out of Belfast ever since. The irony of the landing place is not lost on the work: she exchanged one divided island for another, one long conflict for the tail of a second, and the geography of partition, checkpoints and severed communities became a language she already knew how to read.

Trained first as a printmaker, she now moves freely across textile, drawing, sculpture, installation and performance, cutting and layering surfaces so that the join itself is visible, the seam left proud rather than smoothed away. The clearest statement of it is ‘Tappi Odu (Flee)’, shown at the Ulster Museum in 2024, its Tamil title naming the act that set her whole life in motion. The same concerns run through ‘A to Z of Conflict’, the trilingual artists’ book made by ten Sri Lankan artists across five years and bound so that Sinhala, Tamil and English hold equal rank on the page, an object that refuses to let one language govern the others.

The exhibitions have gathered steadily around this one preoccupation: ‘Marankal’ at Roe Valley Arts Centre in 2019, ‘Transit’ and ‘Rip it Up and Start Again’ in Lisburn, ‘Adrift’ at the Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo in 2025, and ‘Fragmented Crossings’ at Queen Street Studios in Belfast the same year. She is an academician of the Royal Ulster Academy and a member of Queen Street Studios and the Belfast Print Workshop, and her work is held in institutional collections in Northern Ireland and further afield, among them Dublin.

Which returns her to Jaffna, and to the woman standing in a city that is hers and not hers, holding a passport that resolves nothing. She does not mend the fracture in the work, because the fracture is the truth of it; she keeps the seam showing, and lets the crossing stay unfinished.