This latter form appears to have a ‘plug hole’ and there’s a plastic container on the floor beneath it, thus we are taken back to the title. But the roughly salvaged wooden supports, rusted steel rods, a casually draped element and the certain disastrous impracticalness if used as a sink leaves the viewer in no doubt that their imagination is needed to connect with and make sense(s) of this curious creation. As the artist says, “my art relies on the audience to complete it.”

This tactic of requiring the viewer to help make sense of the art develops in subsequent installations. There’s still a fascination with the way certain assorted materials might ‘talk to us’ but more figurative elements appear in works like Tailored Breath, Knowing All That Was Not Improvement and Trash Beach.

In Tailored Breath, for example, there’s a pair of ludicrously long arms. One is purple, suspended in the air, reaching down to grasp a decorative teacup on the floor with three golden fingers. The other arm starts on the floor and stretches up a pillar to not quite arrive at a wine glass that is stuck horizontally above a small dark red and gold material ‘skirt’. This second arm, seemingly made of raw stuffed plain canvas has only a few wrinkle marks drawn on the knuckles of the hand and scarlet painted fingernails. There are also more than twenty small square colourful paintings on the wall. Another element sees a shorter arm dressed in a decorative sleeve with a hand poking out. This third arm rests across four handmade ceramic chalice forms. A further feature consists of what appear to be three insulation blankets wittily painted with diagrammatic and painterly portrayals alluding to the compromised senses of smell and sight. Altogether we appear to be subsumed in some sort of ritualistic space though can’t be certain what’s being communicated or celebrated. For sure, there’s an element of thwarted longing.

Talking more broadly about her work the artist has said, “I am very interested in souvenirs. Part of my practice hovers between ideas of travel, between tourism and pilgrimage. I come from Sri Lanka and going home is like this ritual and I am interested in different bodies in different places, the removal of tourist objects from a location, souvenirs, and the cultural artefacts you might find in museums and elsewhere. […] Having varying frameworks of thought and experience viewers complete the works using what reference points they have, which often draws on travel, film and television.”

Perera’s creations are deftly evocative. The combinations of body parts, objects, materials, all seem to act like visual synecdoche. Small parts that suggest a whole. This economy of means is intriguingly deployed in another assemblage called Touring Permutations. An elegant presence is declared by one feature of the installation that consists of a cerulean papier-mâché arm and hand holding a traditional rounded priest’s fan with these two elements draped in a folded, deep dark blue fabric fringed with a golden design.

During lockdown Perera’s world necessarily contracted, the pandemic along with economic and political upheaval in Sri Lanka meant she couldn’t make the fairly regular trip to her childhood homeland. She says that her practice likewise became more concentrated. Beguiling arrangement of elements in installation form has, for the time being, given way to the production of more pointedly direct works. Her recent series of ceramic T-shirts resemble somewhat crumpled, timeworn garments: the way a treasured souvenir ‘T’ looks having repeatedly escaped the recycling largely because of a sentimental attachment.

Perera’s unwearable garments, however, are also emblazoned with objects – or designs reproduced from objects – that are part of the British Museum collection. These contested items appearing on distressed T-shirts seems to bring the hallowed artifacts into the same orbit as all the other cross-cultural trades, influences, exploitation, looting… Mundane, much-loved articles of clothing have morphed into protest plaques, ceramic advocates for the restitution of plundered artefacts and by inference a critique of colonial violence.

Imagery displayed at the West Graham Street lightbox site in Glasgow features Perera’s newfound T-shirt motif in a series of six works collectively titled Bad Souvenir. The themes addressed in the artist’s BUILDHOLLYWOOD collaboration allude more and less directly to current ecological and societal concerns: grouse hunting, food poverty, social distancing, alienation, etc. These serious, existential threats are lent, however, a humorous note by appearing on an everyday item of clothing. According to the artist, “The series explores how, at a time of widespread trauma we have found solace in unlikely solutions and realised the extent of the malleability of our once fixed lifestyles. In these trying times we realised our capacity for empathy, compassion and, throughout it all, humour.” Perera’s use of witty graphic designs coupled together with eye-catching, saturated colour combinations make for a striking as well as sobering and thought-provoking contribution to Glasgow’s streets.