Kingsley Gunatillake

A Sinhala dictionary sits locked behind bars, a small book imprisoned in a cage, and Kingsley Gunatillake means it as a charge against the printed word: that a language can be turned into a weapon. To follow how a trained painter came to cage a dictionary rather than hang a canvas, you have to go back to a limewashed wall in Wadduwa and a boy drawing on it in charcoal taken from the kitchen fire.

He was born in 1951 into a creative household, a businessman’s family that also produced a poet, a watercolourist and a magician, and his earliest drawings went up on the back wall of the house, neither praised nor scolded when they were found. He came to painting in earnest at twenty-one, took his Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Kelaniya in 1979, and later added a diploma in environmental education from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland. From 1991 to 1996 he served as Chief Coordinator of Art Education for the Central Province, and he has taught for years since at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts and the University of the Visual and Performing Arts in Colombo, settling in Kandy, where he founded a studio for children’s art.

The turn from brush to book came out of the war. In the closing years of the civil conflict Kingsley began to use books as his primary material, an extension of earlier work in which he had cut up photocopied images and newspapers to expose the deceptions carried in print. The caged Sinhala dictionary is the sharpest of these, an argument about the part language played in setting Sri Lanka’s communities against one another. In ‘The Wounded Book’, shown in New Delhi in 2019, he pierced volumes as though with bullets so that the object spoke of pain and loss, and elsewhere folded their pages into flowers. He is careful to say he does not want the results read as sculpture; the book is there for the concept it releases, and to be read past rather than looked at.

That instinct for the printed record has a civic side. After the 1998 bomb attack on the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy, he led a team that helped restore parts of the shrine and copy its murals, and the weeks spent among those stylised traditional drawings fed back into his own hand. He is represented by the Saskia Fernando Gallery, where he showed ‘Battle in the Drawer’ in 2026, having earlier appeared in its 2011 survey of Sri Lankan art; his exhibiting reaches abroad to ‘Don’t Measure Me’ at the Historisk Museum in Oslo, and his 2021 exhibition ‘In Between II’ at Colombo’s Paradise Road Galleries marked a return to pigment worked loose of the brush.

The boy at the charcoal wall spent a life testing what a mark on paper can be made to hold, and came at last to locking a dictionary in a cage, so that a reader would stop and ask what a language had been used to do.