Sri Lankan artist T. Vinoja’s interest in textile practices can be traced back to her childhood – her mother is a seamstress. “When you are born, you are covered in fabric. Similarly, when you die. I see textile as the second skin of our body,” she said to STIR.  Seeing wounded people during the war, the concept of skin became particularly significant for her, simulating a visceral transference of pain. This influences the material she works with – like felt – matted animal fur which she uses to map a landscape, highlighting every living being’s connection to the homeland – which takes a fatal form in works like Burning Home, depicting the immediate aftermath of an explosion, currently on view at her solo exhibition A Moving Cloak in Terrain at Experimenter’s Mumbai gallery in Colaba.

Even the wedding sari, which is preserved for life, was used by many to make bunkers. ...That’s why textile is so significant and such a powerful medium – although a marginalised one in contemporary times. – T. Vinoja

When Vinoja had her first show at Experimenter’s Hindustan Road gallery in Kolkata, India, two years ago, she recreated a typical South Asian middle-class 90s family drawing room, installing a glass-topped table surrounded by mats and leaving books for visitors to read. Among those books was a poetry collection by Sri Lankan Tamil poet, scholar and journalist Rudhramoorthy Cheran, where he recalled living through the Civil War between the guerrilla organisation Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), which fought for an independent Tamil state in northeast Sri Lanka and the country’s government, fuelled by decades of discrimination and persecution against the community.

Vinoja brings him up again as we speak a few days before the opening of the show where she visualises textual metaphors of war by writers like Cheran and an earlier lineage of Sangam poets imagining the Sri Lankan landscape untouched by war, paired with memories of her own and collected from the community around her, in an assemblage of thread and found fabric across textile panels.

“We died in an untimely home,” Cheran would write in A Second Sunrise, which Vinoja included in her Kolkata exhibition. The text reads: glancing sidelong with our dying eyes, at the helplessness / of those who surrounded us, watching / we smouldered and smouldered / then rose up in a smoke cloud. Cheran’s reference to the sudden eruption of landmines buried across Sri Lanka by the LTTE becomes a recurring motif in Vinoja’s work as an embroidered circle with spikes which bursts into a fiery bulbous cloud, like in Burning Home (2024) – where it blooms darkly above a tangle of smoky grey felt shot through with interwoven crimson rivulets, like nerve-endings, reflecting a land under siege.

In an early textile self-portrait made three years into an undergraduate degree at the Department of Visual and Technological Art in Eastern University at Batticaloa, Vinoja’s work already evinced traces of the visual language she would continue to develop. Bunker & Me (2015) portrays a young girl waiting in an underground bunker, pondering, as the sounds of war reverberated around her. “Temporary shelters were made with saris and sarongs,” said Vinoja. “Even the wedding sari, which is preserved for life, was used by many to make bunkers. Then the injured would be covered with whatever fabrics were available at home. That’s why textile is so significant and such a powerful medium – although a marginalised one in contemporary times.”

Vinoja’s relationship with textiles led her to apply for a scholarship to study at Beaconhouse National University in Lahore, Pakistan. During a Master's in Art and Design Studies, she continued to experiment with the possibilities of the textile medium, alongside joining her alma mater Eastern University as a teacher, where she also met the artist Pushpakanthan Pakkiyarajah, a colleague who would become a friend and mentor. “His work derives from his experience of the war as a child, and so does mine,” she reflected. “All the while, I was wondering how to improve my practice and was planning to develop a curriculum on textile-based practices as the university mostly focuses on mediums like painting, sculpture or digital art – so I wanted my Master’s to focus on textiles. There is a Visual Arts and Design department in Beaconhouse National University in Pakistan, so I decided I’d study there.” Vinoja also ensured that she exhibited locally so that her students could see an alternate practice beyond their curriculum and think about contemporaneity.

Heavily influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement, it was in Lahore that she learnt how to make hand-felted embroidered rugs or ‘Namdas’ and related the intergenerational craft practice to her own memories of how fabrics were stacked and stitched to make bunkers, transforming the homely nature of the rugs into a palimpsest of violence. Hidden in bunkers, she would often find herself looking up at the sky during air strikes, later reconstructing a bird’s eye view of an affective geography in figurative abstract motifs that drew from geometric ‘kolam’ patterns after interviews with elders, activists and former neighbours near her house in the northern town of Kilinochchi, which used to be the administrative centre of the LTTE. The house was completely destroyed and rebuilt by her parents after the war.

Tactility becomes significant for Vinoja to convey how war impinges on all senses – like the little girl waiting in the bunker can still hear the noises and screams of war, which creep about like serpentine threads, like sound waves buzzing around her. When she installed the work Scars (2021) at her Kolkata exhibition, its thin textile panels emulating bloodied bandages, visitors’ bodies had to touch them to move forward, like hospital curtains. “Often when you hear music or smell something, you are transported to a childhood memory and incidents which happened then. It’s important to see how we are recalling memories in a different time,” she said.

The Sri Lankan civil war ended in 2009, but millions of landmines remain, despite demining efforts, which makes citizens question if the dust can ever settle. Cheran writes about palmyra palms dotting the seashore and Vinoja ikat-dyes them as individual leaves chopped off from the branch. “The leaves cannot grow after they are cut out…like we feel with lost family members,” she said. She weaves a conversational bond with her extended community, which has now started talking about the war, after years of silence, after she started approaching them as part of Artists for Non-Violent Living, a Sri Lankan collective. Engaging and making conversation, she noted, was something that “can heal us and make us feel better”.

The ‘wound’ is a preoccupation for Vinoja; she focuses on the experiences of disabled bodies in her conversations as she revisits spaces like the LTTE base of Mullivaikkal, where trapped civilians weathered the final days of the war in 2009. She saw a teenager in her neighbourhood get injured; the girl’s father died trying to save her, while she was separated from her mother due to the war. “The war ended one month later, and the doctor told her she couldn’t walk anymore. At the same time, she had to accept she [had] lost her family,” Vinoja recounted. Many Sri Lankans are still looking for missing family and friends, though former President Mahinda Rajapaksa declared that they were deemed dead, and she explores the pervasiveness of the various kinds of trauma that war brings forth. In Homecoming (2024), a fabric, thread and acrylic work on view at the Mumbai exhibition, a woman sits with her hand to the ground, waiting and grasping at something. Her head, tinted red, is lost in thoughts of war. “[They] want to move on and forget, but at the same time, [they] can’t,” Vinoja said.

T. Vinoja’s solo exhibition, ‘A Moving Cloak in Terrain’, is on view from September 11 – October 18, 2025, at Experimenter – Colaba, Mumbai.