Workshop: Akuru Sketch Meet with Indika Jayatilake
The Geoffrey Bawa Trust is excited to be hosting its first Akuru Sketch Meet, a fun, casual gathering for anyone interested in drawing expressive letters.
Indika Jayatilake, designer and founding member of the Akuru Collective, will introduce how letters are seen and perceived, and how tweaking their form can add a whole new layer of meaning.
The participants will then create a series of one-minute expressive letter sketches, each guided by a fun, quirky prompt.
Indika is a brand identity designer with a background in advertising. He is a typography enthusiast and a founding member of Akuru Collective, a community bringing people together to inspire interest in language and type. He currently works as a Brand Designer and a Creative Team Lead at 1705 Studio.
Visual Storytelling Workshop with the GBT Youth Collective
In today’s digital culture, storytelling is often driven by viral trends, audio overlays, and fast-paced edits. While these tools are popular, they also distract from a deeper observation and understanding of spaces.
Join GBT Youth Collective member Vihanga Jayaweera and filmmaker Hari Jashwanth for a hands-on session that follows a core framework of learning, sharing, and creating.
Spaces are fundamentally experienced through light, material, movement, sound, and time. Video is a medium uniquely capable of capturing these dynamic, sensory elements as they unfold. However, capturing the essence of a space does not require elaborate technology or artificial spectacle; it involves allowing yourself the time to be truly present.
Geoffrey Bawa’s architecture demonstrates how spaces can tell powerful, lasting stories through contextual materials, spatial sequencing, and genuine human experience. Inspired by this philosophy, this workshop aims to teach young creatives how to observe and communicate architectural spaces through pure visual storytelling.
Workshop participants will learn how to create meaningful storytelling without expensive tools or fleeting trends, and by tapping into sensitivity, curiosity, and awareness.
Hari Jashwanth is a filmmaker and content creation specialist with four years of experience crafting stories that go beyond chasing trends to create lasting impact. From 2021 until 2025, he conceptualised and ran end-to-end production of two video podcasts for Goodlife X (GLX). As the video production lead for GLX, he produced a mini-documentary capturing the reflections of the creatives who took in the Creative Catalyst Fellowship residency. Hari has also worked as a freelancer on various projects from sportswear-athleisure fashion videography and notably as a line producer for an international concert tour film (Hip Hop Tamizha - TO BE LOVED (Sri Lanka and Singapore Edition). He has also taken part and completed the 4dayfilmmaker course by Hollywood AD Chris Burgess, where he collaborated on a short film project that is currently in final edit.
Workshop: Imprints in Clay, a personalised tile making workshop
Explore the varied textures and materiality of clay while crafting a personalised mosaic tile.
Ceramics are utilised regularly in daily life, yet the full diversity of this form is rarely experienced. Join ceramicist Senali Cooray (Ivy Ceramics), for an exploration of clay’s varied forms—liquid, pliable, dry, brittle, crumbling, or dense—and discover how it can hold a memory of the hands or the tools that formed it.
Participants are requested to bring items such as leaves, seeds, coins, or small items that hold personal meaning to imprint in the clay. Finished tiles will be glazed and fired and available for collection from the Ivy Ceramic Studio or the Geoffrey Bawa Trust.
Senali Cooray transitioned into ceramics after studying and working in interior design. Her work is known for pushing the sculptural boundaries of ceramics, using its form and materiality to reflect the human experience and explore themes of childhood, memory, culture, and religion as a social construct.