The work "Reflecting on how my ancestors sometimes visit me as insects" emerges from my multidisciplinary practice, which traces embodied connections between human and more-than-human kin, the natural and spiritual worlds, and the cultural knowledges carried through generations.
My practice is grounded in a process of reconnection to Sri Lankan cultural practices and inherited ways of sensing the world, whilst also being shaped by my PhD arts research into community-based, socially engaged practice. I am interested in what happens when these worlds meet, when cultural memory, materiality, place, grief, humour and imagination become entangled.
This work began as a textile sculpture made during a community art workshop in Western Sydney. I brought the handmade form into my home and placed it on my composer partner’s grand piano, where I photographed it in such a way that the instrument became a dark, reflective surface. The sculpture appears like an insect reflected in a pool. The image sits somewhere between photograph, textile, sculpture and apparition.
I often wonder about the moths and butterflies that find their way into my life. When one appears, I sometimes imagine it might be my Mum, who died a few years ago, finding a way to visit. It is a thought I hold somewhere between belief, longing and playfulness. I don't need to decide whether it is literally true. The possibility itself is enough.
In this sense, my work becomes a kind of portal between worlds: between the living and the ancestral, the domestic and the cosmic, the material and the spiritual, the everyday and the imagined. Yet I am interested in holding these encounters lightly. There is humour and the sacred in the idea that an ancestor might return as a moth, and joy in allowing the ordinary to become enchanted. This epitomises my multidisciplinary creative practice.
Kumari Abeydeera (she/her) is an emerging multidisciplinary artist, a community arts worker (Senior Community Creative Producer at CuriousWorks) and Phd arts researcher, whose creative practice spans ceramics, textiles, photography, dance and film making.
Kumari’s multidisciplinary practice serves as a portal for exploring culturally imbued knowledges from her Sri Lankan heritage, to being born and growing up in London, to unfurling roots on Dharug and Gundungurra land in the Blue Mountains, where she has lived over the last decade.
Kumari has exhibited in group shows since 2023 including being a finalist in the Women’s art prize at the Ellipsis gallery in Woolloomooloo in 2023, at Landslide Gallery (now Loaf Gallery) in Wentworth Falls in 2024, at Braemar Gallery in Springwood, at the Blue Mountains Cultural Centre in Katoomba, at Roppongi strip gallery in Tokyo and Outhouse Gallery in London, all in 2025.
