Wijesuriya’s images hover on the edges of abstraction. She explores the transformative properties of paint in her work; how even in the attempt to ‘copy’ exactly from life or a source image, something unpredictable happens. The subject of her recent work has been smashed ceramics, both ancient and modern. Although these objects have been broken apart, the resulting images feel full of potential and possibility. Despite an overarching interest in still life objects, her work investigates the dynamism of these fragments of pottery; in the work they seem to tumble, drift and fall through space.
Her recent work is inspired by: the endurance of the ceramic object as an artefact in a museum context, a functional object in a domestic setting, a symbol of empire and its legacy and as a source of innovation and controversy in the case of Duchamp’s Fountain. By smashing, reconfiguring and painting these objects, she defamiliarizes the everyday and allows us to come to things afresh.