Biography

Roma Tearne is a Sri Lankan born artist living and working in Britain. She arrived, with her parents in this country at the age of ten. She trained as a painter, completing her MA at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford. For nearly twenty years her work as a painter, installation artist, and filmmaker has dealt with the traces of history and memory within public and private spaces.

In 1998 the Royal Academy of Arts, London, highlighted one of her paintings, "Watching the Procession," for its Summer Exhibition. As a result her work became more widely known and was included in the South Asian Arts Festival at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 1992.

In 1993, Cadogan Contempories, London, began showing her paintings. In 2000, the Arts Council of England funded a touring exhibition of her work. Entitled 'The House of Small Things' this exhibition consisted of paintings and photographs based on childhood memories. They were the start of what was to become a preoccupation on issues of loss and migration.

She became Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2002 and it was while working at the Ashmolean, as a response to public interest, that she began to write.

In 2003 she had a solo exhibition, Nel Corpo delle cittá (In the Body of the City), at the MLAC Gallery in Rome.

She is currently the holder of a three-year AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Fellowship, at Brookes University, Oxford and is working on the relationship between narrative and memory in museums throughout Europe.

She has been awarded funding by the Arts Council of England in order to make a film on memory and migration. The film, commissioned by Impressions Gallery, will be premiered in 2009.

Her second novel Bone China will be published in April 2008.