Sri Lanka portraits 2006 - 2007 ©

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In December 2006 I began a two month residency in Sri Lanka, being one of the first of a group of six artists to work at the Chandrasavanah Creation Centre in the south of the island. Our brief was to carry out a residency project and to assist in setting up the Arts Centre as a resource for International artists and local communities. The project was set up by HARF, the Hikkaduwaa Area Relief Fund, established by Neil Butler and Nicky Sheehan, not long after the tsunami devastated the south of Sri Lanka and much of the coastline along the basin of south east Asia. Nearly 40,000 people died in Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck on 26 December 2004. Half a million were made homeless.

I started conversations with HARF back early in 2005, once the charity and rebuilding programme was under way, initially just with the desire to get involved, to help in some way. The rebuilding moved on at an outstanding rate, and HARF had begun work on the Creation Centre, an arts resource for residencies, projects and creative ways of adding to the various communities along this part of the south coast, as well as Sri Lanka as a whole. We spoke about the need for a sort of psychological support that the arts and creative projects could offer. Within this context it really made sense. The physical rebuilding, in some ways was the easy part of a much more complex process.

After investigating various potential projects for my residency in Sri Lanka, including an arts festival, a peace tour and a documented journey across the island, from the war torn north to the beaches of the south, I retuned to my original idea of portraits, collating thousands of high-resolution images of people who live and work there. The portraits, combined with interviews, create a collection of images and stories covering meetings with a wide range of people. The material is intended for a book about the island, a story of hope and survival, as well as a study of how the face expresses who we are and how we got to be there, our communality and our individual uniqueness.