Michella Perera

Michella Perera is a Sri Lankan-Irish artist who graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 2017  with an MFA. Her practice incorporates participatory events which function as a research tool, allowing her to explore the impact of cultural practices on communities, and integrate in the shared storytelling of neighbourhoods. Having moved from Sri Lanka, she explores the sensorial story of movement, cultural taboo, and the solidarity/empowerment of women. Her work draws on Ayurvedic practices which use plants, herbs and spices as tools for healing in the Indian subcontinent highlighting indigenous culinary knowledge, medical practices & ethnobotany. Recently she took part in the Serendipity Arts Festival in Goa, India and the TEST Space residency at the Limerick City  Gallery of Art.

She invites viewers into a speculative world built from an archive of shared storytelling, particularly within South Asian immigrant communities. Her acrylic paintings explore the paracosmos of a series of unidentified and highly pigmented women as they realise a more personal and intimate relationship to cultural material, forgoing traditional practices. Through their hands and feet, they extrude tactile knowledge, delineating an idiosyncratic understanding of their heritage and indigenous plant lore. Relief textile patterns punctuate the paintings, reminiscent of traditionally carved architectural elements, now reconfigured in the feminine practice of textile manipulation. Through these peculiar rituals the female protagonists reclaim the agency to create and structure their world - a place suggestive of ancestral worlds, compiled from nuanced cultural memories.