Born in 1956, Tissa De Alwis has lived and worked all his life
in the city of Colombo. A self taught potter, he started his miniature
figure making very early in life. As a child he was introduced
to ‘Plasticine’, and by the of age twenty, he had
made numerous types of military figurines from Napoleonic figures
to crusaders as well as modern military hardware prototypes from
around the world. In 1976, he joined the Ceylon Ceramics Corporation
factory at Piliyandala, Sri Lanka where he had access to the whole
process of pottery making. His training was totally a project
of experimenting and self discovering where he acquired his knowledge
on clay on a ‘look and learn by your self’ basis.
He worked in the studios of the Ceylon Ceramics factory as a Modeler
and subsequently as a Studio Potter from 1979 up to 1981.
He has exhibited his work extensively in Sri Lanka and taken
part in number of international art events. Some of them are the
1st Asian Triennial in1999, at Fukuoka Asian Art Gallery, Japan,
the 3rd Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Queensland
Gallery, Brisbane, Australia in1999 and the Crafty Thought, an
exhibition of contemporary Sri Lankan art held in Liverpool, UK.
