About

Kumari is Sri Lankan-British-Australian and was introduced to ceramic practice  more than two decades ago when she started co-facilitating pottery groups in her role as an occupational therapist, empowering people to find a path to holistic wellness through clay based creative praxis. Over the years Kumari has used clay in group work settings as a psychotherapist working in the field of Women's Wellness in London and Australia.

 

In 2016 upon leaving hippest East London for the wilds of the Blue Mountains on unceded Darug and Gundungurra land to weave a more embodied and creative life with her family, Kumari started focusing on her own ceramic practice and studied with many Master potters locally.

 

In 2022 Kumari commenced a Phd at the intersection of decolonial feminist politics, ceramics and health, exploring the excavation and reweaving of ancestral knowledges through a clay based methodology. This enquiry has informed her current body of work of sculptural, biomorphic, sensous vessels.

 

Each sacred vessel is created using ancient pinching and coiling techniques and takes days to handbuild in Kumari's sunlit homestudio which looks out upon the verdant mountainscape of tea tree, wattle and eucalypts swaying on the banks of a gently gurgling creek. The creation of each and every vessel is a ceremonial ritual entangled with an embodied exploration of ancestral wisdoms and informed by the elements, the land and the more-than-human kin guiding this artistic-spiritual-knowledge making practice. After the vessels are handbuilt and have been allowed to dry, they are bisque fired in the electric kiln, affectionately named Kali. Some vessels then journey through the flames on the land in a smoke firing process, embelishing their surfaces with a patina reminiscent of moonscapes, whilst others are hand glazed and refired in Kali to stoneware.

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Kumari's artistic and scholarly journey involves continued individual and collective ceramic praxis to explore the ancestral, the ancient, the mythical and the liminal; and the sharing of these sculptural ceramic works and the insights gleaned in their creation with a diverse audience who feel called to engage with these luminous art objects and their embodied sujectivities.