Hema Shironi creates intricately crafted textiles that comment on political situations, inequality and division in Sri Lanka, and express the artist’s personal experience of living in the country. She employs processes of stitching, embroidery and appliqué, and incorporates paper and photographs in her works to intimately reveal peoples’ stories and experiences.

Buried alive stories 2020 is drawn from Shironi’s grandmother’s accounts of the treasured belongings she buried around her house when forced to move during Sri Lanka’s civil war (1983–2009) – a house the artist was never able to visit. Shelter For Life 2022 features peoples’ stories of struggle from different regions, incorporating all three languages commonly spoken in Sri Lanka – Sinhalese, Tamil and English – which are seldom published alongside one another. Shironi’s ‘SALE SALE story SALE’ series 2022 is similarly based on the realities of individuals in Sri Lanka struggling to meet their basic needs – its text taken from the social media channels of international news outlets and philanthropic organisations. Here the artist stitched through a printed page, which was later dissolved to reveal a decomposed threaded surface.

Erasing Flag 2019 presents five fragmented versions of a dissolving flag – whose colours convey the nation’s cultural mix – to conjure how the flag is used as both a weapon and symbol of pride in Sri Lanka. Starving Flag 2022 reconstructs the Buddhist flag, combining fields of colour, and the moral principles they represent, with embroidered objects. Each motif is central to a recent crisis or period of civil unrest.