Visual artist Dr Shanali Perera Follow.Art Card

About me

I spent years learning to read the body clinically. My practice began when I had to learn to read my own body differently.

I am a self-taught interdisciplinary contemporary artist, author and former physician. My work sits at the intersection of the body, the clinical gaze and politics of visibility, shaped by a triple perspective: medical knowledge, lived experience of illness, and visual storytelling. I began making digital art when pain and physical limitations made traditional methods difficult. What started as a means of expression became a visual language for experiences that resisted words. I later moved into acrylic painting, expanding across digital media, moving image and hybrid forms.
My process is intuitive and embodied. I use movement, abstraction, gestural mark-making and intentional distortion to translate internal sensations into visual form. Figures emerge, intertwine and transform. Sometimes they stand alone; sometimes they gather, hold or confront one another. Through them, I explore vulnerability, resilience, identity, collective care and what happens when the body we inhabit becomes unfamiliar. At its heart is a question of visibility. Medicine taught me to look at the body from the outside; illness forced me to experience it from within. Art brings those perspectives into dialogue. I am interested not simply in representing illness, but in questioning who defines what is visible, whose experience is believed, and how the clinical gaze can coexist with the reality of the person being observed. Increasingly, my work moves between physical and digital spaces, allowing paintings to evolve through animation and moving image. Throughout, I return to the same impulse: to visualise the invisible — transforming private, embodied experiences into shared human encounters. Ultimately, my work is not about illness alone. It is about identity, connection and becoming: what remains, what changes, and how we continue to reclaim ourselves through uncertainty.