Pāḻ veedu series

Pāḻ Veedu (Abandoned House) is a cyanotype-based body of work that I developed around ideas of migration, memory, unstable belonging, and personal histories of movement. The works emerged from my own experience of growing up in a family that was constantly relocating because of financial and social circumstances. Because of this, the idea of “home” always felt temporary and fragmented to me. 

The title Pāḻ Veedu refers to abandoned or ruined houses, but for me it is also about emotional spaces, memory spaces, and the feeling of returning to something that no longer exists in the same way. Many of the images in the series appear fragmented or faded, almost like apparitions or partial recollections. The works are made using cyanotype because I was interested in the material and emotional qualities of the process itself. The monochromatic blue surface felt connected to fading memory, distance, disappearance, and archival traces. I was also interested in how cyanotype creates fragile and unstable surfaces where images slowly emerge and dissolve. 

I worked with recycled brown paper bags, tissue paper, layered surfaces, and delicate materials throughout the series. The brown paper bags are important because my father has been manufacturing recycled paper bags for many years. These materials already carried personal memory, labour, movement, and economic history before becoming part of the artworks. The works also connect personal experiences with wider literary and mythological narratives around exile, wandering, and displacement. During the process, I was thinking about Tamil oral traditions and texts such as the Ramayanam, Geetha Saram, and Vaikunda Ammanai, where migration, separation, and unsettled existence repeatedly appear within the journeys of different characters. 

Landscape also became important within the series, especially memories connected to Batticaloa and Colombo. I was thinking about disappearing spaces, changing urban environments, and whether memory can preserve places that physically no longer exist or have transformed completely. Overall, the series exists somewhere between archive, memory, disappearance, and personal testimony. I wanted the works to feel fragile, unsettled, and suspended between presence and absence.