What are our oldest memories? The voices of our parents? What do we remember about our roots? The house we grew up in? Who shaped us? Which memories made us who we are today?

In an attempt to recall those memories I started painting the people I found on old archived family photographs. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, parents. As the paint was drying, I remembered stories which reminded me of a time before I emigrated to Europe. A civil war was raging back home in Sri Lanka, but in my memories full of biases and gaps it was a safe haven. A world full of wonders. Stories which I found significant and so exotic and vastly different to our difficult or at best mundane life as immigrants. I changed to digital painting and for each person I painted, I tried to remember stories I associated deeply with them. Each story, a memory immortalised by one item or thing.

Each of the depicted items symbolise a time, a place, feeling, being, consciousness. As memories they are naive, faded and distorted and are based on personal perceptions of reality, self and others. Events which shaped the trajectory of being and influenced beliefs, personality and future decisions.

The digital paintings are materialised into embroidered portraits on silk. Embroidery being a technique used in ancient Sri Lanka to immortalise heritage, belonging and identity. In this form, they are personal heirlooms, family insignia or aide-mémoires of a complex time. Woven narratives of an existence left behind, before it started again somewhere new. Memories from an imagined, remembered simpler life.