Helena Samarasinghe

For the artist, the immediacy of drawing parallels the act of playing sport: mark-making becomes a form of unscored choreography, where gesture and pressure register the body in motion. The physicality of the medium foreground touch, speed and exertion; dense colour and repeated contact with the paper surface render the image as an index of embodied experience.

Helena’s interest lies less in elite competition than in the grassroots experience of sport and the feeling of it. For the artist, playing becomes a way of reckoning with one’s own limits, building resilience and a quiet confidence through physical challenge alongside others, rather than pursuing spectacle, personal bests, or the commodified culture that often surrounds professional sport.

Stylistically, the work draws on the bold, gestural contours of Kalighat painting. Produced quickly and circulated widely, these paintings foregrounded everyday subjects and disrupted colonial hierarchies and elite courtly traditions such as Mughal miniature painting. Helena extends this lineage through an amplified scale, emphasising tensed musculature and psychological intensity. Sporting performance becomes a site through which resilience, visibility and agency are negotiated.