Shattered Horizons traces Vinoja’s early memories of the civil war, displacement, and survival. After a bomb blast in Rathnapuram, Kilinochchi, her family fled across multiple locations, eventually settling in India—separated from her grandmother and their former life in Sri Lanka. In India, Vinoja first came across kolam drawings, whose patterns and rituals eventually became an influence in her visual language.

Returning to Sri Lanka during the war’s final stages, the family moved between makeshift shelters in Vallipuram, Thevipuram, Kompavil, and finally Maththalan. They shared land with other displaced families, drew water from communal wells, and built bunkers amid escalating airstrikes. Each location brought new encounters, collective struggles, as well as finding solace in community and the strength to endure.

Vinoja vividly recalls her own journey carrying notebooks and a sack of rice on a bicycle with a flat tire as well as witnessing death for the first time along the roadside. In Maththalan, thousands of displaced people built bunkers and shelters by the sea, forming a haunting landscape of survival. The visual motifs in Shattered Horizons draws from these fractured geographies—anonymous movements, fleeting solidarities, and personal as well as collective imprints of a war that quietly insist on being remembered.