About

Vinothini is a visual artist, poet, and naturalist whose work explores themes of displacement, identity, refuge, and the evolving concept of home. Growing up during the Sri Lankan civil war, she taught English as a second language and yoga before migrating to the United States in 2006. These experiences deeply inform her artistic practice, which examines personal history, violence, oppression, and resilience.

Her work integrates text - alongside color, collage, and fabric, employing a technique where written language gradually disappears within the drawings, symbolizing erasure, memory, and transformation. Deeply connected to nature, she sees landscapes as sites of both belonging and contested histories, often incorporating on-site drawings to capture the layered complexities of place.

Her art refuses toxic processes. Rooted in her deep relationship to land, she avoids harmful materials, uses minimal energy, and lets the sun dry her work. A UC-certified naturalist, she draws from the rhythms of the nonhuman world and the urgencies of a planet in crisis. Also a published poet, her process is intuitive, raw, and emotionally driven—guided not by logic, but by feeling. Through mark-making, erasure, and layering, she gives voice to what is often silenced: the earth’s memory, the body's grief, and the enduring will to remember.