Biography

MA Book Arts 2004 Camberwell College
MPhil (1996) & MSc (1994) London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
MBBS (1983) Faculty of Medicine Colombo Sri Lanka
Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers
Fellow of the Society of Designer Craftsmen
Member of the Society of Graphic Fine Arts
Member of the 62 Group [Textile]
Public Collections-Tate Britain, V&A Museum, Yale Centre for British Art.
Awards-Gold Medal-International Bookarts Competition, Seoul 2005
Birgit-Skiold Award-Excellence in Bookarts-ICA London 2005
1^st Prize-Shelter-USA 2008
SCU Award-NSW, Australia 2009
Best Overall Book Design(NPB)-Society of Bookbinders International Competition 2009
1^st Prize Drawing for Design-Rootstein Hopkins Foundation-Draw 2011[/wpcol_2third_end]

Open Folio

YOUR SPACE OR MINE?
Perera’s bimodal status as a Sri Lankan émigré and British Citizen informs her multidisciplinary practice, an amalgam of influences based on her training as an artist, scientist and doctor. Her work reverses authorship, through interactive prints, artist-books and installations, inviting the viewer to add/subtract, inscribe/erase and/or rearrange the sequence in different permutations.
The work often escapes the confines of the gallery space to occupy alternate sites, to observe/explore archival properties of printmaking techniques.
Traditional techniques of mezzotint, lithography, etching, aquatint, drypoint, sugarlift, chine collé, monoprint, collagraph, embossing; are harnessed to CNC methods: laser cutting/engraving and stitch to form hybrid prints.

Exhibition

LINES EXPLORING SPACE…
Photographs of shadows were used to produce open-bite acid-etched, aquatinted zinc-plates to emboss/stitch-an artistbook that threw shadows that changed throughout the day. A detachable magnetic spine converts a ‘codex-like’ structure to a concertina format to oscillate between a private and public reading dependant on mode of display.

“… a drawing simply is no longer a drawing, no matter how self-sufficient its execution may be. It is a symbol, and the more profoundly the imaginary lines of projection meet higher dimensions, the better.”  [Klee]
[Part of a series of artistbooks touring USA/UK/Canada/Egypt/Iceland/Australia & Japan]