Curator’s Note

On the Painted Self: Iromie Wijewardena and the Aesthetics of Becoming

What is a self, if not a choreography of gestures inherited, repeated, and revised? In Iromie Wijewardena’s work, identity is never fixed; it is enacted. Each figure, wrapped in movement or stillness, tells of a self assembled in time: through rituals of labor, adornment, performance, and waiting. These women are not static symbols but temporal beings, each brushstroke a trace of becoming.

Wijewardena does not offer the viewer a singular or essentialized identity. Instead, her work returns us to the body, not as a biological fact, but as a site of meaning. Clothing, posture, and gaze are not decorative; they are epistemological. A woman balancing clay pots, or pausing in mid-dance, is engaged in more than cultural display; she is constructing herself within and against a matrix of tradition, visibility, and desire.

In paintings like Tea Break and Waiting, identity unfolds as quiet resistance. The body leans, reclines, rests, but never disappears. In Dancers in Movement and Flute and Violin Player in Crimson, selfhood is communal, rhythmically plural. Even The Final Adornment, with its elegant economy of line and gilded marks, asks us to consider how we become visible, how the ornamental, so often dismissed, becomes ontological.

There is an ethics in this work. Not of grand declarations, but of attention to the daily, the ancestral, the sensual, and the seen. In Wijewardena’s hands, color is not merely expressive, it is structural. Identity is built through contrast, texture, repetition. And always, the feminine is not a given, but a question posed again and again in pigment and line: Who are you, when you are looking back?