Observing wounded histories and suturing fragments of remembering, Vinoja addresses multitudinous facets of Sri Lanka’s civil war decades and unresolved aftermath relaying how ethnic as well as linguistic division, weaponized realities and state brutality collude in delivering generational loss as well as environmental toxicity devastating lands and waters. She registers how alienation and rupture of the domestic sphere interrupted her childhood years, which included separation from her grandmother and fleeing by sea to find refuge in Southern India. Her small-scale pieces made with needlework, acrylic, and found materials including items of clothing, reflect a responsive aesthetic of portability and crafting within realms of urgency. They bear the demarcations of escape routes, tents, barbed wire, scars of land mines, check points, and artillery shelling—represented in dense patterning, dots, lines, and topographical mappings—scripted from memory, field recordings, and sustained conversations among Tamil elders, former neighbours, humanitarian activists, and disabled youth across the Northern peninsula. In particular, T. Vinoja has been committed to listening as a strength-giving practice despite systemic erasures, forced silencing and political censoring of testimonial records. 

During her time in Lahore, the artist took to learning traditional felt and wool craft practices using the Namda technique originating from Kashmir, practiced today in Pakistan and parts of India. Through this shape-shifting and fibrous medium, Vinoja connects to the body as repository, and to conflict zones as extended planes of flux, breakdowns, and unknowns—addressing threat and refuge, protection and annihilation, vulnerable bodies and volatile terrains. In ‘Enduring Traces: The Power of Lineage in Collective Memory’ (2024), she reflects on the site of Mullaittivu that witnessed genocidal terror, plotting the seaside (karaiyam), water wells, and farmlands (vellam) in handstitched pieces through aerial perspectives. Drafting exposed and fugitive elements; overlaying experiential matrices of inflamed territories and threatened civilians in seismic magnitude—this potent work reminds how traumatized landscapes and roots endure, yet are never still or mute. If only one knew how to listen in continuum.