For over 30,000 years, Sri Lanka’s Wanniyala-Aeto tribe acted as forest custodians, trading wild bee honey, herbal medicines and meat. Their way of life blended secure and independent livelihoods with sustained traditions. But this was fading. Modernisation, resettlement and loss of hunting rights resulted in pursuit of other employment avenues such as subsistence farming and unskilled work.This body of work explores identity and displacement in the 21st century: How we define a culture in modern times, and what it means to be geographically, culturally and economically displaced. The work prompts us to reflect on how we conserve the immaterial side of traditions and practices, and why, when environments change. When a way of being is superseded, by force or will, and shifts to a different reality filled with new codes, rituals and destinies. 

Large scale black and white negative portraits – a blue print of reality – depict tribespeople with eyes closed, preserving and suspending a fleeting moment of strength and vulnerability. By showing my work in photographic negatives, I question our visual understanding of our environment – things which we see every day, without registering these parallel dimensions. In a homage to the oral tradition that conserved many practices through generations, the stories of the people accompany each image. Fragments of past, present and future collide and coalesce; the tribespeople offer their truth, told in their own words.