Personal Work

COCONUT WATER AS BIOMATERIAL

Using the naturally-occuring bacteria in coconut water, I created a biodegradable plastic material. Growing up in Sri Lanka, coconut waste was something very familiar to me. I looked homeward for a solution to plastic and found something unique in coconut water. Although it took much trial and error (it's not very easy to grow scoby, I learned), I was able to successfully produce a few samples of biodegradable material that was self-adhesive and stretchable.

Tule Fog DANCE & Kite

This was a collaboration project with Melissa Ortiz, an Industrial Designer based in Salinas, CA. Melissa and I share a passion for community-based work and climate change awareness, and we find inspiration in the culture and history we grew up in. We built a dance prop that captures fog and transforms it into a usable water source. Additionally, we built a kite that served the same purpose. We wanted to create products that require the 'manual labor' of the participant to implement positive contributions to the environment around us, but we also wanted it to be leisurely, like dancing or flying a kite at the beach. Melissa led the construction of the kite and dance prop while I worked on the machinery that captured and processed data. The project took us a month to complete, but we hope to continue to work and build on this.

GPS DRAWING MACHINE

My interest in maps led me to build a drawing machine that uses your GPS coordinates to draw an 'abstract' map. Using your coordinates as inputs, the machine cycles through your GPS every time it's turned on, giving 16mm versions of 'abstract maps' for each GPS coordinate. A solar-powered GPS drawing machine can draw until the end of time. This was created using Arduino.

MISC. PROJECTS

While this is not a comprehensive collection of my work, I wanted to share some of my favorite projects I have worked on in the past two years.

Poster that accompanied a pamphlet on Immigration in America

Netflix Matrix Poster

Poster on how artists used art as a tool to archive the Sri Lankan Civil War

A coffee table book consisting of all of the photos and objects collected over the course of my life. It was a way to document and catalog memories and each spread contained two unrelated memories only connected through similarities in form. I experimented with binding the book using dripped wax

A book of Sri Lankan Mythology designed in both English and Sinhala, the native language of Sri Lanka

A drawing machine that created abstract paitings in collaboration with waves. I dove into the cold waters of Ocean Beach in San Francisco to converse with the waves through art

A book functioning as a love letter to dark-skinned South Asian women who experience colorism. I used translucent paper and french-fold to create pages that hid meaning under the surface. This technique was a commentary on how there is more to a person under their skin. The forms are imprints of my own skin created with ink and paper