Take a Chill Pill: Anoma Wijewardene on How Much a Woman Is Allowed to Endure
Original article | Published: 26 May 2026 | By Thaliba Cader, The Sun
For internationally acclaimed artist Anoma Wijewardene, art has never merely been about aesthetics. It has always been an act of excavation, of memory, fracture, identity, grief, healing, and the fragile tensions that exist between destruction and renewal. Across decades of work spanning painting, installation, sculpture, digital media, video, sustainability, and activism, Anoma has built a visual language that feels at once deeply intimate and globally urgent.
Having exhibited at prestigious international platforms including the Venice Biennale at Palazzo Bembo through the European Cultural Centre in 2019 and at Sotheby’s Hong Kong Gallery in 2016, her artwork has garnered solo shows across Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi, the Maldives, Dubai, London. Yet despite this international recognition, her artistic voice remains profoundly human, vulnerable, and emotionally unguarded.
After studying at the iconic Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London and working in the United Kingdom for nearly three decades as a designer, artist and lecturer, Anoma now divides her time between London and Sri Lanka, where her studio practice continues to evolve through emotionally layered mixed media paintings, digital works, sculpture installations and video art. Her works often feel less like static images and more like living psychological landscapes. Boats, rivers, fractured figures, pathways, wounds, and crevices emerge and disappear within heavily textured surfaces, inviting viewers into meditations on impermanence, reconciliation, existential anxiety, climate collapse, healing, and the restless search for meaning.
There is a haunting duality within her practice. The paintings carry devastation, yet also transcendence. Violence and tenderness coexist. Fragmentation becomes reconstruction. Through layered surfaces, torn textures, and abstract forms, Anoma explores what is found through loss, what survives destruction, and what remains human in a world increasingly shaped by conflict, greed, isolation, and emotional disconnection.
Her multimedia trilingual installation on reconciliation, which incorporated writings on peace, music, performance, and video, was exhibited at the National Gallery of Sri Lanka, further reflecting her long-standing engagement with memory, humanity, and collective healing. Beyond the gallery world, her earlier work in design extended into fashion and design, with creations displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the House of Commons in London. Her clients have included iconic fashion houses such as Yves Saint Laurent, Pierre Cardin, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren, while her work has also appeared in international publications including the cover of Vogue UK. She was additionally selected by India for the SAARC Art Exhibition, which toured all seven capitals of the SAARC region, and later spent over a decade as a visiting lecturer at leading British art colleges including Central Saint Martins.
But beyond the accolades and international recognition lies something far more powerful: an artist unafraid to expose emotional truth. Anoma’s work resists spectacle. Instead, it asks viewers to sit with discomfort, vulnerability, longing, and silence. Her art does not offer easy answers or decorative optimism. It offers something rarer: emotional honesty. In a world increasingly consumed by noise, performance, and distraction, her work insists upon introspection, humanity, and the quiet possibility of healing.
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