Roma Tearne
Roma Tearne is a Sri Lankan born artist living and working in Britain. She arrived, with her parents in this country at the age of ten. She trained as a painter, completing her MA at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford. For nearly twenty years her work as a painter, installation artist, and filmmaker has dealt with the traces of history and memory within public and private spaces.
In 1998 the Royal Academy of Arts, London, highlighted one of her paintings, “Watching the Procession,” for its Summer Exhibition. As a result her work became more widely known and was included in the South Asian Arts Festival at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 1992
In 1993, Cadogan Contempories, London, began showing her paintings. In 2000, the Arts Council of England funded a touring exhibition of her work. Entitled ‘The House of Small Things’, this exhibition consisted of paintings and photographs based on childhood memories. They were the start of what was to become a preoccupation on issues of loss and migration.
She became Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2002 and it was while working at the Ashmolean, as a response to public interest, that she began to write.
In 2003 she had a solo exhibition, Nel Corpo delle città (In the Body of the City), at the MLAC Gallery in Rome.
In 2006 she was awarded a three-year AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Fellowship, at Brookes University, Oxford where she worked on the relationship between narrative and memory in museums throughout Europe.
Out of this work came Watermuseum a film set in Venice which was shown at the Coastings exhibition in Nottingham in 2008. In 2008 she received funding from the Arts council of England in order to make a film on memory and migration. This film is due to be premiered in 2010.
Her second novel Bone China was published in April 2008 and her third Brixton Beach will be published in June 2009.
She will be having her first solo exhibition since 2001 at the 198 Gallery, Brixton at the same time.
Roma Tearne is currently a Creative Writing Fellow at Brookes University, Oxford.
“Once you have been tortured, you can never belong in this world. There is no place that ever be your home.”
“It is impossible not to make mistakes during a war.”
“Grey has no agenda. . . . Grey has the ability, that no other colour has, to make the invisible visible.”
“Some say art is our highest form of hope. . . . Perhaps it's our only hope.”
“Has there ever been a country that, once colonized, avoided civil war?”
“It is important for women to do something about what they see.”