Intuition and Making: A Conversation with Aruni Dharmakirthi
In Conversation with Erika Nathanielsz
Photography by Christopher Garcia Valle
Aruni Dharmakirthi allows their intuition to guide them. The Sri Lankan-born artist and teacher relies on pausing, listening, and looking to the past to guide their making. Their work reflects the lives of the people who came before them. Family, home, and spirituality. Aruni’s limitless exploration of materials and textures speaks to the spirit of their practice, to not bind yourself to a medium. To keep exploring. As an educator themselves, these concepts that root their practice also get passed down to a new generation of artists.
E: I was curious about your upbringing. I know you were raised in Florida, but I didn't realize you were born in Sri Lanka.
A: Really? Yeah, I was born in Sri Lanka and then I moved to America when I was five years old, so we moved in 95.
E: Do you have any core memories of Sri Lanka?
A : I do. Yeah. It's funny. A lot of them are based around my childhood home, which I guess makes sense. I was so little, but I do have specific memories that feel very detailed, and I'm not totally sure why, because it's such a young age.
E: Beautiful. How often do you visit back home?
A: This is more of a recent thing. I moved to Florida in ‘95 and I didn't go back until 2016. I was fully an adult. I was in college at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon and went back to Sri Lanka to do research. My thesis project had a lot to do with immigrating and the memories of that home so I went back for that. And this year we're going back as well, and I'm trying to make it an effort to go more often now.
E: I can relate to that feeling of wanting to come back to your familial home.
A: It was pretty intuitive. The first time I did it was as a kid - I had an art class in middle school. It was a sewing class that my science teacher actually taught, haha. She was very cool.
My mom would also teach hand stitching to us when we were little in the summer. Back then I was really into the idea of becoming a fashion designer.
E: I also wanted to be a fashion designer as a kid haha.
A: Right? I had notebooks full of clothes that I would draw out. There was a lot of interest in fabric and textiles as a kid. And then in undergrad, I took a soft sculpture class. So that was the other way that I got into it more as an adult. I took that class twice, I really loved my teacher Kelly Boehmer. After I took that class, it kind of felt like the path that I would continue to work within.
For collage making, I did it periodically throughout my adult art practice, and right before I went to Oregon, I started to do digital collages of my family photos. Right before I moved, I remember scanning a bunch of my parents' photographs. I was just going through and just thinking, I'm going to do something with this, but I don't know what. It did end up becoming a big part of the projects I was making when I was over there.
E: Oh wow, I was wondering how that started. I noticed a lot of photo incorporation in your quilts. That's cool to hear how that started, archiving and then turning it into something.
A: Yeah. It was definitely something I did even when I was little, just going through those family photographs. I think my parents also enjoyed doing that. With my aunts that lived in Florida, I would always wait for storytelling to happen, and to talk about the experiences they had and whatnot. And so I would look through those books all the time or those albums all the time. But yeah, right before I left, I was like, I want to do something with this, but I don't know what exactly. And then it kind of turned into those sort of strange surrealist photographic collages.
E: That’s wonderful. I love the sharing of information passed down through family. Your recent exhibit is entitled Shrine Room, correct?
A: Yeah. Yeah.
E Cool. I was wondering what the thread was for those pieces and how you came to naming it Shrine Room?
A: So when I was making those pieces, it's so funny…I was teaching a lot of oil pastel drawings to my students. I teach art classes as well, but I was doing a lot of still life drawing with my students. I was looking at a lot of still lifes, and then I started noticing that I was making a lot of that as well. I also started to practice Buddhism more seriously in the past couple of years, and I've been learning a lot about the practice of having a shrine, how it functions within the Buddhist lineage, and it kind of came together. A lot of my work, I feel like it comes together intuitively.
My studio practice is in my home. So there is this aspect of looking at the things that are around, there are so many different still lives that I can see and put together. I created these still shrine pieces as well as these felted works, which I kind of thought of as almost divinity type figures. And so all of the shrines are kind of around that central felted composition.
E: Got it. Yeah, I was really curious about the felted works too. Is this a new texture that you were playing around with, or is it something that you've incorporated in your work before?
A: Yeah, I have incorporated it in my work before, but as small patches. So within the quilted pieces, I've had felted pieces that I've made mostly needle felted, small faces or spirals. They're usually single iconographic images. But this is definitely a newer project that I've been doing, it's a mixture of wet felting to make the sheets of fabric, and then also needle felting, where I'm kind of drawing or painting directly onto the felt.
E: Got it. I love those pieces, by the way. They're beautiful. There was something about it that felt really dreamlike.
A: Yes, they really look like watercolor in a way. There's a looseness to it, which I love that you described as dreamlike.
E: I'm always curious with artists on how they decide when a piece is done. What does that process look like for you?
A: That's such a great question. I think it changes for different pieces. Some of them feel really planned out, and so I'm working from a sketch and I'm just trying to get it as close to the sketch as possible. I think some of the works are made much more intuitively where there might be a loose plan, and then I am sort of working with the idea and compromising with how the material functions. So, yeah, it's kind of an intuitive process. But I do work from my sketches often. Or if I'm struggling with an idea, I'll go to my sketchbooks and just kind of look at ideas that I've had from the past and see where maybe certain themes are coming up.
E: I love the flexibility in the process. I'm glad you brought up Buddhism earlier. I saw you were teaching meditation classes. Can you talk about your experience with Buddhism?
A: Yeah. So I was interested in Buddhism after I moved to New York, maybe a year or so after I moved I started to look into it a lot more. My family is culturally Buddhist. Their indigenous practice was Buddhism, but they are also Catholic, so I was raised Catholic as well. For special occasions, we would go to a temple and make offerings, but outside of that, I didn't have a lot of experience with Buddhism.
After I moved to New York, it really was just a way to figure out mental health stuff. I was just looking for meditation practices, and it kind of felt like an onion. I got to the surface level of these introductory breath meditations, but I just became more and more curious the more I looked into it. I started exploring more, looking into podcasts and going to different meditations and different yoga centers. Eventually, I started going to a space called Three Jewels in New York, and I'm part of that Sangha.
And so I did a meditation teacher training through them, actually, and that really opened the practice up for me even more. But yeah, it's been a really interesting exploration. It's primarily Mahayana Tibetan Buddhism. It's pretty interesting. It's an untouched form of Buddhism that came from India, which eventually Buddhism kind of died out a little bit in India. So yeah, it was an interesting history of it.
E: That is really interesting. I resonated with you about living in New York, and seeking out something for your mental health. I feel like I often needed to pause when I was in New York. Is meditation a daily practice of yours?
A: I'll say it ebbs and flows. It definitely depends. I wish it was a daily practice of mine, but a few months ago, I was so fully in my teaching practice that it kind of fell off, and now I'm trying to do yoga or meditation every day. So it's always an ideal that I'm working towards. And I guess that's the aspect of it being a practice. It's always something I'm working towards.
"And I guess that's the aspect of it being a practice. It's always something I'm working towards."
E: That's true. That's a very good point about practice. I love to hear about your art teaching experience and how that has maybe influenced some of your work now.
A: So I started teaching art maybe six years ago. It was a year after I moved to New York. But it's been a really great experience. I kind of just fell into it. I was just looking for a job, and if it was in the arts, that would be more ideal. And I don't think I ever really considered myself a teacher when I started, and now I am fully sold on it. I primarily teach in New York City public schools, and I work through a nonprofit. The really nice thing about that is that it's not a class that's graded. The idea is that we're teaching kids to have studio practice.
It's a way to teach them how to express themselves. I try to definitely show them lots of different versions of artwork. If I'm showing a still life, I'll show them a variety of artists' depictions of a still life so that they can see that there isn't one way to make a specific subject. I try to open it up as much as possible. And I think some things that I'm really interested in teaching them is point of view and being able to talk about your work and also defend your ideas. And if we do critique, I tell them that you can say no to a suggestion and say, “I want it to be this way.”
E: That's really important and probably very impactful to be a kid and be told from your teacher that there is more than one way to make or create something. And that you can stand by your ideas too.
My next question before we go into the presentation, what do you envision for the future of your art practice, what's next for you there?
A: I've told myself several times that I want to build a large-scale installation. More recently, I’ve been wanting to make costumes as well—almost like sets—and creating performances is something I've been playing around with. And yeah, I think it would be really fun to collaborate with others and make projects that people could wear and bring the works to life in a way.
E: Yeah, that's really cool. I love the flexibility in your work. You keep me surprised!