Arulraj Ulaganathan

Tea dust is worked into the paper itself, rubbed and stained into the surface until the drawing carries the very substance it is about. Arulraj Ulaganathan grinds tea and natural dye into his grounds and then draws, across them, the people who pick it: the plantation workers of Sri Lanka’s central highlands, and the women among them most of all. To see why a painter should make the material of his art out of the estates, you have to begin in the line rooms of Haputale, where he was born in 1992 and raised inside the labour he now records.

He grew up among the Malaiyaha Tamils, the Up-Country or Hill Country community whose ancestors were brought from South India by the British in the nineteenth century to work the coffee and then the tea, and who were left stateless for decades after independence. That history of forced migration, dispossession and quiet endurance is the subject he returned to when he began to paint. He studied away from the estates, taking a Bachelor of Visual Arts at Pondicherry University in India and a Master of Fine Arts in painting at the Government College of Fine Arts in Chennai, and he carried the hill country back into the work rather than leaving it behind.

The estate is the whole of it. He keeps his colours held back and close to the ground, the browns of steeped tea and turned earth and worked-in dirt, and into that muted range he sets portraits of pickers, the line rooms, the railways cut through the hills, and the forests felled to make the green slopes a visitor now calls scenery. The tea powder pressed into the paper is the reveal: the commodity that built a colonial economy becomes the medium in which its workers are drawn as people, with faces of their own, in place of the anonymous hands behind a cup.

It was the collector Malaka Talwatte who gave Arulraj his first exhibition, the earliest to put the estate series before an audience, and from there the work has travelled. His solo exhibition ‘A Life in Tea’ was shown in Colombo in 2024, and ‘Plucking the Stars’, made with Colomboscope, followed at Curado Art Space; his estate series featured in ‘The Land Sings Back’ at the Drawing Room in London in 2025, in Colomboscope’s ‘Way of the Forest’ and in ‘Total Landscaping’ at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Colombo, while his painting entered the George Keyt Foundation charity auction conducted by Sotheby’s in December 2024, the first the house held in Sri Lanka. He works with the APRE Art House in Colombo.

The line room returns at the close. Arulraj grinds the estate into his paper because the estate is where his people were placed and made to stay, and the drawing that comes up through the tea dust is a way of giving the pickers back the visibility the plantation was built to deny them. The boy from Haputale paints the hands that filled the world’s cups, and signs them.