Painter · Maldives
Liusha
Ali
Capturing memories and emotions through mixed media. Art made to be felt deeply, not just looked at. Four group exhibitions at the National Art Gallery, Malé. Commissions open worldwide.
About
A close look at
ordinary life
I’m Liusha Ali, a painter from Feridhoo, North Ari Atoll, in the Maldives. I work mainly in acrylic on canvas, alongside mixed media, crochet and recycled materials.
I love experimenting with different materials and processes, often photographing my own references to freeze a raw, honest moment in time. What holds the work together isn’t a strict medium — it’s the desire to capture memories and emotions so that people can genuinely feel the art, rather than just look at it. I paint the ordinary, unposed moments of life as we actually experience them, holding onto fleeting feelings long after they pass.
Feridhoo’s own history runs back to East Africa. Island tradition holds that in the eighteenth century Maldivian sultans bought enslaved East African men while on pilgrimage to Mecca, and freed them before their deaths as an act of religious charity. Two of those men — one remembered as Sangoru — were granted land and settled on Feridhoo. Many families on the island trace their descent from him step by step.
Their drumming became boduberu, the big drum, now the national music of the Maldives. When I paint a gathering, that rhythm is underneath it.
My work has been shown four times at the National Art Gallery in Malé since 2023, including the mental-health exhibition Shades of Mind — Art that Heals. Alongside the paintings I make crochet and recycled pieces, which took first place in a national inter-house recycled art contest in 2024.
Selected Work
Paintings &
made objects
A Boy’s Dream
As children our imaginations run wild with enormous dreams. They might look impossible, but we believe nothing is unachievable.
Silver Lining
Every storm has its way of passing, no matter how disastrous. No matter the judgements and the million eyes, you would make it through every wave of emotion.
The Ladies of Maldives
A reinterpretation of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, reimagined through a distinctly Maldivian lens.
Whispers of the Flame Lily
A lone flame lily in dense green forest, catching the light that breaks through the trees. A symbol of endurance, and of the wild wonders hidden in the woods.
Untitled — The Gathering
Boduberu drummers and dancers at a gathering, painted from the position of someone standing inside the circle rather than watching from outside it.
Reef
A reef built from discarded net, plastic and fabric on a painted ground. The winning piece from the Inter-House Recycled Art Contest, 2024.
Manta
A single ray held against open water, worked in layered strokes so the surface moves depending on where you stand.
Orchid Bag
Crocheted from wool, petal by petal. The made objects and the paintings come from the same impulse: slow attention to something ordinary.
Exhibitions
Shown at the
National Art Gallery
Commissions
Work made
for you
Custom Paintings
Portraits and pieces for the home — a family portrait, a room that needs something of its own, a painting made for one person in particular. These are the commissions I love most: work that means something to whoever receives it.
Resorts, Liveaboards & Guesthouses
Original work for hospitality spaces, as a single statement piece or a full collection across rooms and common areas. Maldivian subjects painted by a Maldivian artist, made to your scale and palette.
Live Painting
Painting in the room as it happens — weddings, receptions and events. Guests watch the piece take shape through the evening, and it leaves with you at the end of the night.
Something Else
Surprise me. Murals, collaborations, recycled and mixed-media work, briefs that don’t fit a category. The unusual requests are usually the good ones.