Chathurika Jayani

A gas torch to a sheet of cardboard. Chathurika Jayani scorches and works corrugated board, tissue and handmade paper into raised, three-dimensional surfaces, building the tin roofs and packed lanes of Colombo out of the very material those roofs are made of. The corrugated sheet that covers a shanty becomes the corrugated sheet she paints on, and the ordinary city that most of us drive past without seeing is lifted, detail by patient detail, into something a gallery wall will hold. To see why she keeps returning to the parts of the city no postcard shows, you have to look at what she says she finds there.

She was born in Colombo in 1984 and has worked there since. She took a diploma at the Abacus Institute in 2005 and then a Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting at the University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo in 2011, and from the start her subject was the urban landscape that sits below the skyline: slums, informal settlements, the improvised architecture of people living simply. Her materials are deliberate. Wood, cardboard, corrugated board, tissue and a torch let her build the texture of that world rather than merely depict it, so the surface of the picture carries the roughness of its subject.

What she looks for in those streets is the opposite of pity. Writing about her 2016 exhibition ‘Escapes’, she described wanting to capture ‘bolts of freedom’ in the lives of people who live very simply, noting that their shelters, their clothes and their festive decorations are, despite hardship, bright and full of colour. That is the spine of the work: the tension between progress and identity, between what development promises and what it clears away, held without sentimentality and without turning the poor into a lesson.

The exhibitions map that argument. ‘City’ opened at the Lionel Wendt in 2012; ‘Escapes’ followed at Paradise Road Galleries in 2016, growing out of an earlier body of work on the slums; ‘The Secret Vows’ showed across 2018 and 2019. In 2022 the Saskia Fernando Gallery presented ‘Dreamscape’, where the corrugated tiling of everyday buildings was pushed into fantastical, ahistorical structures observed from several viewpoints at once, an entry into a wider conversation about architecture and urban planning. In 2024 she was chosen among ten artists from more than sixty applicants for the George Keyt Foundation’s ‘Sri Lankan Artists 2024’ at the J.D.A. Perera Gallery, and in early 2025 her collection ‘Dream Paradise Odyssey’, drawing the earlier series together, was unveiled at Cinnamon Life.

Back at the workbench, the torch touches the board again. Chathurika takes the cheapest, most disposable stuff of the city, the sheeting people are given and told to be grateful for, and makes it hold light. The overlooked, in her hands, is where the looking should have been all along.