Southbury Art Trail_19
Arjuna Gunarathne_ARTIST
Arjuna Gunarathne (arjunagunarathne.com) is a Sri Lankan artist who has lived and worked in the UK for around twenty years. His practice is driven by observation, memory, and the desire to connect visually with others. He describes his work as a response to lived experience: family, place, social environment, and perception. He trained at art school in Sri Lanka and moved to London in his late twenties, motivated by a desire to encounter master artworks in person. Seeing original paintings up close mattered to him deeply. He wanted to understand technique, texture, and the physical presence of the artist through the work. Museums and galleries became a form of education in themselves. Arjuna comes from a family of artists. His wife and two children are also creatively focused, and art is embedded in his daily life rather than separated from it. Arjuna grew up in a small Sri Lankan town surrounded by trees and mountains. He describes it as once cooler, quieter, and less crowded than it is today. Sri Lanka, for him, is a place of beauty and turbulence: political unrest alongside tourism, farming communities, coastline, and ancient sites. It is culturally mixed, but deeply interconnected. Neighbours talk, share, and spend time together in ways that feel less possible in the UK due to work patterns and pace of life. Ponders End is now his home. He describes it as mixed in culture but more structured, modern, and emotionally distant than the place he grew up. He no longer fully belongs in Sri Lanka, but does not entirely belong here either. This sense of in-betweenness runs through his work. He uses a powerful image to describe this feeling:
“Something from the rainforest cannot be planted here. It will die without maintenance.”
This question of where home is becomes central. His paintings function as a way of creating home when physical belonging feels uncertain. Colour is the core language of Arjuna’s work. He believes everyone has a personal connection to colour, shaped by culture, climate, and experience. Living in London, which he experiences as visually grey, he deliberately uses bright, expressive colour as a form of contrast and resistance. His “Colour Man” paintings carry a double meaning: skin colour and cultural colour. He notes that artists from hotter countries often use brighter palettes, while English painters tend toward muted tones, a difference reflected not only in art but in clothing and daily life. He cites Turner as an influence, particularly Turner’s use of structure. Arjuna adapts this structural grounding while using his own vivid palette to express emotion, identity, and place. Arjuna began sketching and painting people he saw spending time outside his studio. They were often of a similar age to him but from many different cultural and racial backgrounds. What connected them, he felt, was not appearance but spirit. He recognised a shared loneliness. He describes a feeling of collective displacement. “We are not belonging to this place.” This emotional connection became a recurring subject in his work. Through painting others, he was also painting himself. Arjuna sees his studio as a real-life painting. It is active, layered, and alive, holding the history of work made there over time. He notices how everything around him is living, ageing, and changing. While the area itself often feels grey to him, moments of colour emerge through festivals, weddings, and ceremonies. These bursts of colour echo the vibrancy of his own work and reinforce his belief that colour carries memory, identity, and life.
This is Southbury Art Trail
(click here to view additional sculptures)‘This Is Southbury Art Trail’ is a new creative placemaking initiative celebrating the Southbury and Ponders End neighbourhood shaped by community, resilience and industry. The new public art trail weaves together 3D portraits, poetry, and local voices to honour Southbury’s identity and bring everyday stories into the public realm.
DYSPLA, an award-winning art studio in Enfield, was commissioned by Enfield Council to deliver this innovative digital art and 3D sculptural project working with 30 community members, to shape this bold new public art trail and offers a wonderful opportunity for local people to come together and shape who they are, where they live and how their work is shaping the area.
The 3D digital art trail is approximately 1 km long, stretching from Southbury Road, along Kingsway and culminating on Queensway. This project is part of Shaping Southbury — a public realm and community engagement programme being delivered by Enfield Council’s Journeys and Places team and supported by the UK Shared Prosperity Fund.
