Nanelle Jayawardene (b. 1992) was raised in a Sri Lankan household in Surrey, England. With her family, she split her time between England and visits to Sri Lanka during childhood. Time spent with grandparents, aunts and uncles, in the urban chaos of Colombo, among coconut groves by the sea in Galle, and in the leafy calm of Kandy, were defining experiences. The constant clash between these worlds, and the ongoing negotiation and reconciliation they required, are formative experiences that Jayawardene brings into her work, seeking to amplify and articulate them through painting.
Jayawardene studied Architecture at the Universities of Bath and Cambridge, driven by a fascination with the built environment and the ways in which it shapes human behaviour, culture, and social interaction. This spatial sensibility remains central to her practice. Her approach is consistently architectural, interrogating how space accommodates conflict, enables coexistence, and reflects practices of peacemaking within the public realm.
Entirely self-taught as a painter, Jayawardene sustained a parallel artistic practice alongside her professional career as an architect and later as a project manager delivering buildings. Throughout this period, she developed a body of work that explored recurring concerns of space, power, and human interaction. As a new chapter unfolds following her relocation to Abu Dhabi, she has committed fully to her painting practice, drawing increasingly on South Asian mythology alongside ideas of space, ritual, and the dynamics of peace-building and conflict-resolution in contemporary life.
Jayawardene’s work carries a quiet irreverence, tempered by reflection. A tension is embedded within the painted surface itself: deliberately spontaneous, rapid brushstrokes sit alongside slower, more carefully worked passages of detail. In her work, the themes and essence of South Asian mythological fables, shaped by millennia of accumulated wisdom, are re-examined as living frameworks through which the modern world is continually played out. Her current practice explores enduring themes of power and authority, subservience and resistance, conquest and vulnerability, beauty, and the passage of time.
