Machado’s champion for The Wick is Jhaveri Gallery founder, Amrita Jhaveri. Machado is currently included in the gallery’s current exhibition alongside the late photographer, Lionel Wendt and the award-winning Sri Lankan artist Vasantha Yoganathan, until August 24th. She told The Wick “Cassie’s works address important themes of diasporic identity and post- colonialism with a lightness of touch that is rare in such politically grounded work.”

Machado mentions a personal high of her career to date which reveals her devotion to the place in contributing to the arts scene in Sri Lanka, where many of her works are made: a piece titled Fig. 1 90° 18’ 43.057 N 80° 47’ 11.726, E (2014) from the artist’s series Afterlife was included in an exhibition entitled One Hundred Thousand Small Tales, curated by Sharmini Periera for the Dhaka Art Summit in 2018 – which then evolved into the first exhibition at the Sri Lanka’s first major contemporary art museum, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka (MMCA). “It was a huge achievement to have my work recognised by a curator I respect so much and to see my work featured in such a significant exhibition, marking both the culmination of a body of work and the debut of a pioneering institution in Sri Lanka’s contemporary art scene.”

The next project Machado is turning her attention to is still in development – but a first glimpse of it appears in the fascinating group show Bridge to Sri Lanka at Jhaveri Contemporary. The work responds to the work of the Sri Lankan modernist photographer Lionel Wendt, and its connections to themes of diasporic identity and post-colonialism, explored in a book published in 1950 after his death, titled Ceylon – the British colonial name for Sri Lanka. The body of work, With When Colours Return Home to Light, is an experimentation with Photograms – the camera-less analogue technique propelled by the Surrealist movement in the 1920s, also central to Wendt’s photographic practice of the same era.

By literally bending the optics of light, “the technique has allowed me to re-imagine what it means to make a portrait and ultimately to re-imagine how we see ourselves and each other”, Machado says. “Rendering portraits of members of the South and Southeast Asian diasporic communities in bright brilliant electric light, the Photogram portraits offer an expansive, unbounded and abundant idea of imagining identity that resists the essentialising of identity around ideas of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, as well as around traditional hierarchical ideas of self and other”.