ARC FESTIVAL 2026! Last year at Broken Frontier I was so taken by artist Shri Gunasekara’s experimental, landscape format comic Runner that I just knew she had to be a part of this year’s Broken Frontier ‘Six Small Press Creators to Watch’ number. Built for Love, Gunasekara’s most recent offering, is much shorter in page count but shares many of its predecessor’s form-pushing and presentational aspects. And it perfectly sums up the reasons why I was so excited by her practice that she made that ‘Six to Watch’ shortlist.
Built for Love is a meditative visual essay on our capacity to love; both in the sense of the positivity that it can evoke and in the way it can overwhelm and consume us. Gunasekara begins by contrasting love with other emotions – sadness, anxiety and anger – colour coding each with a lush use of emotive hues that resonate with the reader with a subtle communicative quality before exploring our own relationship with this most intense of feelings.
What’s particularly striking here is Gunasekara’s ability to switch from modes of conveyance. Sometimes it’s via a combination of imagery and perceptive and eloquent narration. On other occasions there’s a step back from exposition and a move towards pure visual metaphor to talk to the reader on an entirely different level. One page detailing love’s all pervasive presence (below) is an excellent example of her deft manipulation of page structure to press her points, while the gorgeous final page acts as a powerful summary of the comic’s themes in one unforgettable piece of symbolism.
Shri Gunasekara will be at ARC as part of the Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ contingent where you can buy Built for Love in print. Visit their table to discover work from herself and some of the most exciting emerging, and in some cases now established, indie voices currently working in UK comics.
Shri Gunasekara (W/A) Self-published
Visit Shri Shri Gunasekara’s site here
Review by Andy Oliver
Shri Gunasekara will be tabling with the Broken Frontier ‘Six to Watch’ at the ARC Festival comics fair on July 11th-12th. For the full details on everything ARC has to offer check out their website here.
Poster by Lando
