Everything in the shop comes from one of these six. We buy directly, we pay before the work starts, and the name of whoever made your piece goes in the box on a numbered card.
The pit loom at Thalagune · Thalagune, Udu Dumbara, Central Province
Karunawathi weaves in a pit her grandfather dug into the floor of the house in 1948. The weaver sits at the edge with their legs down in the pit and works the treadles with their feet, which is why the loom has never moved and never will. She started at fourteen, in 1986, sitting beside her mother and being allowed to throw the shuttle on the plain sections only.
Wijesuriya lac turning · Matale, Central Province
The lac comes from an insect that lives on the palu tree. It is collected as a resin, cleaned, coloured with mineral pigment, and drawn out into sticks the thickness of a finger. Sunil holds a stick against a wooden blank spinning on a foot-powered lathe until the friction melts it, and the colour goes on in a single unbroken pass. If he lifts too early there is a seam. There is no filling a seam.
Gunasekara carving shed · Ambalangoda, Southern Province
Ambalangoda is the mask town. Every workshop on the main road carries kolam and sanni masks for the dance dramas, and Nimal trained on those — eighteen sanni faces, each one a different illness, each one with a fixed set of proportions you are not permitted to improve.
The dye yard at Bentota · Bentota, Southern Province
Batik is drawing in reverse. Everything Padmini puts wax on is everything that stays the colour it already is. She works light to dark — wax the whites, dye yellow, wax what stays yellow, dye red, and so on down to indigo — so the design exists complete in her head before the first line goes on, and gets buried under wax as it goes.
Perera & Son, cutters · Ratnapura, Sabaragamuwa Province
Ratnapura means city of gems, and it is not a marketing name — the alluvial gravels under the paddy fields have been worked for two thousand years, by men in shafts propped with rubber logs, hauling baskets up by hand. Ranjith does not dig. He cuts.
The garden at Kosgoda · Kosgoda, Southern Province
A Sri Lankan home garden is not a hobby. Chandra's is two-thirds of an acre behind the house at Kosgoda and it does four jobs at once: coconut, cinnamon, a stand of tea on the slope, and a bank of grey clay where the land drops to the river.