Shamina Senaratne - interdisciplinary artist

Shamina’s textile art explores how we witness and narrate the world; how we are or are not able to thread fragments together, edit, and revise, to create meaning and coherence; and how our stories in fact contain both what is said and left unsaid. She is interested in intercultural interaction and questions of identity, self, other and community.

Place, texture, pattern, cultural practice, language, spaces between, what is made/ what is unmade, seen/unseen… all these inform the narratives she makes space for.  Her work is document, testament, meditation, invocation, which she approaches as a poet, an archivist, an observer, a participant.

Shamina has studied a range of textile and mixed media arts, and also has a BA in Communications and Public History from Simon Fraser University. Her studies in textile design, colour theory, dye techniques, surface design and needlework have been through independent research and exploration, through annual workshops and the Maiwa Textile Symposia. Textile and contemporary artists she has studied with include Dorothy Caldwell, Kerr Grabowski, Daniella Woolf, Charllotte Kwon, Carol Soderlund, Michael Brennand-Wood and the Quilters of Gees Bend.  She is also a member of the Vancouver Guild of Fibre Arts and Surface Design Association.

Her mixed media quadriptych “a Q?, 2010, was purchased by Simon Fraser University Gallery, for the University President’s Boardroom, Strand Hall.  Her textile works have been included in such important group exhibitions as To Visit the Tiger at the Vancouver Community Arts Council Gallery (1992), Artropolis 93 in Vancouver (1993), Desh Pardesh (Toronto, 1994) where she was also artist-in-residence, and The Return of the Tiger at the Pendulum Gallery (2003). Her recent work has been exhibited in various shows in BC, across Canada and in the US.

Shamina’s text based music and performances have been performed at Sonic Boom, Women in View Festival and the Kiss Project. As a writer, in the 90s and early 2000s she did many readings of her fiction and poetry at Asian Heritage Month, and various festival, community, library, gallery and bookstore events in Vancouver, Seattle and Toronto. As a member of Seven Sisters, she appeared at the Vancouver International Festival of Writers and Readers in 1998 and 2003. Her writing was published in anthologies such as North West Edge, Lady Driven and Seven Sisters, and in literary journals such as West Coast Line and Dandelion.

Check out Shamina's website for more info >