Here and Now: Gold Coast Triennial 2024 Digital Gallery
Kuweni Dias Mendis
b.1979 Badulla Sri Lanka, lives Beechmont QLD
Mud Cloth , 2022
earth pigment on silk
Image courtesy of the artist
Artist Statement
Mud Cloth from the series Running Rivers: pigment of place was a journey of remembering my gait, posture, words, rhythm, time and space belonging to a decolonised body. As a non-aboriginal migrant woman of colour and culture, the soil helped me connect the silence of the land and the senses of my body.
Working with earth pigments helped me become playful and explore beyond the known to be at the potential where there is uncertainty yet where life thrives, overflows and flourishes.
About the Artist
Kuweni Dias Mendis is a Sri Lankan-born, multidisciplinary artist based in Australia since 1999. As a diasporic artist, her work reflects her diverse experience of culture and identity. She works across raw mark making, Yantra drawings - symbolic drawings from ritual art in Sri Lanka - installation, performance and video art.
Australia has deeply influenced her artistic practice, focusing on integrating an art practice between regenerative, arts activism, and cultural facilitation. Kuweni is a certified Regenerative Practitioner from Regenesis USA. She uses ritual and ceremony as the source of her artistic manifestations and creative inquiry into the pulsation of place.
Kuweni has been an advocate for marginalized groups of women, and she uses her practice to amplify these voices to create social change through co-created artwork, participatory art experiences, exhibitions, merchandise and public artwork.
