Maryathevathas Vijitharan

A surface of sea shells and ink, titled ‘Motherland I’, holds the memory of a coast that people fled. Maryathevathas Vijitharan works with the very material of the northern shore, shells gathered from the beach and the farmer’s hoe, and turns it toward the experience of the Vanni’s civilians during and after Sri Lanka’s long war. The choice of material carries the argument: things lifted from one specific place, made to speak for that place and the flight of the people from it.

He graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Jaffna in 2014, and his work has stayed close to the region that formed him, the Vanni in the far north where the war’s last years fell hardest on the people who lived through them. His paintings and mixed-media pieces set down mayhem and displacement, and among them the brutality visited on women in his hometown; the register is plain and unsparing, the grief carried by the objects as much as by the image. He builds those objects from the material of the coast itself, the shell and the farmer’s hoe, things that are already inscribed with locality, so that a handful of shells becomes a way of naming a place and what happened there. The work asks the viewer to read a landscape through the debris it leaves behind, and to take the flight of civilians as its true subject rather than any single event.

‘Motherland I’, made in 2015 of sea shells and ink, appeared that year in ‘Seven Conversations’ at Saskia Fernando Gallery in Colombo, where his use of shells was read alongside another artist’s use of tea materials as a shared way of speaking through things that are socially and politically charged. His work travelled to the Kathmandu Triennale in 2017, and to New York in the same year for ‘Portraits of Intervention: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’ at Aicon Contemporary, a survey that set the northern experience beside the rest of the island’s art and read his shells as one artist’s answer to the question of how a place remembers. Saskia Fernando Gallery represents him.

The shells return the work to where it began, on a shore in the north that so many people left; in Vijitharan’s hands the debris of that coast becomes a way of holding on to a motherland measured in what the war took from it.

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Selected works

1. Life in a Burning Forest, mixed media on paper, from the ‘Home/Land’ exhibition · University of Exeter (Environment and Sustainability Institute, Cornwall).
   • Source: https://news.exeter.ac.uk/uk/cornwall/international-partnership-brings-compelling-new-exhibition-to-cornwall/
   • Alt: ‘Maryathevathas Vijitharan, Life in a Burning Forest: a mixed-media work on paper of overlapping forms and memories evoking displacement from northern Sri Lanka.’
2. Untitled (1) (2016), mixed media on paper, from ‘Portraits of Intervention: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’ · Aicon Contemporary, New York.
   • Source: https://www.aicon.art/exhibitions/portraits-of-intervention/selected-works
   • Alt: ‘Maryathevathas Vijitharan, Untitled (1), 2016: a mixed-media work on paper drawing on the materials and memory of the Vanni coast.’
3. Untitled (2) (2016), mixed media on paper, from ‘Portraits of Intervention: Contemporary Art from Sri Lanka’ · Aicon Contemporary, New York.
   • Source: https://www.aicon.art/exhibitions/portraits-of-intervention/selected-works
   • Alt: ‘Maryathevathas Vijitharan, Untitled (2), 2016: a mixed-media work on paper layering shell, ink and found material from the northern shore.’