“A long, hard look”
Click here for John’s second blog post, detailing his experiences in week 2 of his residency at Sura Medura.
“A long, hard look”
Click here for John’s second blog post, detailing his experiences in week 2 of his residency at Sura Medura.
We’re delighted to share this great piece of work by our Sura Medura artist Elisabeth Wildling. ‘Fitzcarraldo en Hikkaduwa’ was created by Elisabeth during her residency at the Sura Medura Centre this winter, and was aided by great collaboration from all our artists in residence this year. Enjoy!
You can find out more about this years residency project and the resultant ‘Moving Out’ Festival by reading through the blogs on this website, by visiting www.uzarts.com/residencies and on the Moving Out Facebook
UZ Arts are delighted to announce that they will be working with IN SITU to bring six European artists to Sura Medura Internationation Residency Centre through their Europeans Abroad fund. The residencies, which will take place in the winter of 2014/2015, will give the chosen artists the opportunity to explore and develop new work in response to their environment.
The international directors are:
Adrian Schvarzstein
Since 1989, Schvarzstein has been working as a clown, actor and theatre director after studying ‘Commedia Dell’Arte’ in Italy. Recent projects include the street theatre performance ‘Kamchatka’ (Miramiro Prize 2008) and directing the opera ‘La Barca’ in Holland. A Catalan by adoption, but really a mixture of various nationalities whose formation took place all over Europe, Schvarstein has spent his life avidly accumulating experiences and it would be difficult to find a field of artistic activity that does not interest him
Kitt Johnson
Danish dancer and choreographer Kitt Johnson has beeb developing her unique artistic universe for more than 25 years. Her style is at one minimalist, expressive and innovative. She has been artistic director of the company Kitt Johnson x-act since 1992. With this company she has created more than 50 productions nationally as well as internationally – her trademark is solo performance, but her repertoire is wide and also includes ensemble works, Cirque Nouveau, site-specific work and children’s performance. Kitt Johnson X-act also mounts and curates performance festivals with the company, including the site-specific MELLEMRUM biennale, contributing to her ambition to create a platform from which Danish and international performance art can engage in dialogue and share experience.
Alex Rigg
Alex studied Fine Arts at Glasgow School of Art and at the University of Ulster and has since had a prolific career in practising various art forms. As well as having thirty years of practical experience in building large-scale structures in timber, steel, cloth and stone, he has also been creating and delivering live events since 1982. Particularly iconic are the large-scale willow, steel and timber fire-sculptures that Alex and colleague Trevor Leat create together for festivals and events, including the Wickerman Festival and many par Hogmanay events. Similarly, his incredible work in physical theatre, dance, sculpture and design has been shown internationally, and his company Oceanallover has created many innovative events, bringing new audiences to physical performance.
Europeans Abroad aims to create bridges with artistic and cultural partners outside Europe in the form of residencies or co-productions. Calling on its experience throughout the European territory, the IN SITU network offers its partners and artists the opportunity to enhance their practices by discovering the realities of other continents.
Nothing Like Anything
During the final phase of the residency, after completing our work for the Biennale, we based ourselves in the village where our house was located.
The strange ebb and flow of energy, the heat and resultant addled thinking meant that sometimes we struggled to engage with the development of ideas and at other times we had too many things to be working on.
There were two ideas that we began, but didn’t manage to complete during our stay:
Tsunami Museum
We had wanted to explore ideas of home through the life of the woman running the Tsunami museum in the ruins of her house that was destroyed by the Tsunami (see blog 1) and we had visited her to audio record her talking about her life. However the museum is right on a main road and it was impossible to get a good voice recording due to the traffic noise, hooting tuk tuks and buses etc. Perhaps we will be able to transcribe the audio and combine the text with still images, however we decided to put the idea on the back burner and focus on other areas.
Photo Manipulation
Photographs feature prominently in most peoples homes, with framed prints (mainly of weddings) standing in groups on the floor. People we visited always showed us their photo albums, often the laminated images having become damp and degraded into fractured versions. Albums of funeral images were also produced.
During the time that we spent finding print shops, we had noticed that the busy photo printers all had computers (very few people have them at home) in the public areas with photos being manipulated, viewable by all. Bride and Groom would be being extracted in Photoshop and pasted onto a more suitable backdrop, shoes were being touched up, tatoo’s being removed and rings being erased from fingers. This manipulation process fascinated us and we began experimenting with photo’s of people we met on the Wewelgoda road. People love having their photo taken and enjoy seeing the image. The idea was to take a photograph and then give back the photo to the subject, but with the photo manipulated in some way to represent the context. We started the project by taking an image of the man who operated the railway crossing. We took a photo of him and then gave him back the photo of himself photoshopped onto the platform of an old photo of the Flying Scotsman. He was enjoyably flabbergasted as he remembered when there were steam trains on his part of the line.
We also took a photos of one of our tuk tuk driver friends and sent him and his tuk tuk into a taxi rank in London in the 1950’s (his reaction when we gave it to him was brilliant) Unfortunately our time in Sri Lanka ran out and we had to leave that project for another time.
The rest of the work took the form of small-scale experimental works, and we worked on completing the remainder of the strands that we had been developing.
Street Bags
We concluded the street bag project. We developed a series of designs that included images and writing reflecting our time in Sri Lanka. The text pieces explored our response to the surroundings and the climate and were designed to be small provocations dropped into the street life in the towns and cities. Ideas ranged from the dreams of lost cosmonauts to swimmers in underground oceans, All explored the feeling we had that there was more than one way that we were ‘present’ in this place. We made multiple copies of each design and made them into bags.
We gave bundles of the bags to street sellers who were delighted to use them as they normally have to buy them from the home recyclers. It was great to hand them out and then walk back down the street and see them being used.
Within this project we also developed a small-scale collaboration with Garry Duthie, Prof. of Nutritional Science at the Rowett Institute of Nutrition and Health, Aberdeen. He had been involved in developing a recipe book called
‘Stovies Reloaded’, reworking traditional Scottish recipes to make them healthier. We had been surprised to see so many vegetables commonly grown in Scotland, on sale in the markets; leeks, potatoes, cabbage , beetroot etc
We used recipes from Stovies Reloaded, had them printed and made them into bags for street sellers. Perhaps some Sri Lankan homes will be experimenting with Scotch Broth and leek and potato soup! We are also hoping that the images will make for interesting discussion points about recycling and healthy snacks back in Scotland.
Dogs of the Wewelgoda Road
We completed the printing of our educational posters of the local dogs (see blog 2) and gave them out to children along the road. They had fun pointing out all the dogs that they knew. The poster was on display at the community event that we held (see below). The poster has been laminated and hung at the gates of the local community project for passers by to see. A second poster featuring additional dogs has been given to Eddi who runs the community project with blank spaces for children to draw any dogs missing.
Paper Slippers
We continued to experiment with our paper flip flops, the process of which helped us to explore the public space in the village which seemed to be mainly temples and space outside the small shops. There are places along the road (which is really a dirt track) where people stop and chat , and outside our house was a small area where boys came and played cricket after school. Our garden was in reality part of the pitch and the ball would often land on our roof and in the garden. We placed the flip-flops in public spaces as well as outside houses and in gardens, experimenting with different configurations. This caused much interest as well as discussion and identification of the plants that the flip-flops were made out of.
Community Showing
Our house was at a crossroads in the village and many people passed us everyday as we worked in the garden. Much of our time there had been spent smiling, waving and saying hello to passers by. We had made friends and people came to visit and chat to us. Everyone seemed intrigued by what we were doing so we decided to have a community ‘showing’ of some of the work that we and fellow artist Hannah Braxton had been making. We put up a screen between the pillars of out house, which was viewable from the road and borrowed a projector from Eddi at the community project.
We made ‘Busby Berkley ‘style stop frame animation with the paper flip flops using photos of the flower that grow in the village as the backdrop. Life in Sri Lanka felt surreal much of the time, and we created the animation to reflect that. We projected this at dusk together with an animation that Hannah had made of local house brooms. We also made an installation with the flip flops inside the house for people to peer in the window at and the dog poster was on display.
We told a few people about the event on the day of the showing and hoped that word would spread – it did! Children came and helped with the preparations and at dusk people started arriving. We were also graced by the presence of one of the dog ‘stars’ of the poster. Together with Hannahs fabulous work, there was a lot to see, and the garden was full of children and adults having a good time – it was a great night and lots of fun.
Tuk Tuk
We met up with Duminda to film him driving around the jungle roads. Glasgow based musician, Anders Rigg (Samson Sounds) had written a great reggae track for his tuk tuk incorporating sounds of the jungle, the daily sweeping and the tuk tuk that we had recorded and sent to him. Duminda has a big sound system in his tuk tuk and you can hear him coming from a long way off.
We hopped in the tuk tuk with Duminda , and with Anders track blaring, he took us on an exhilarating trip round the area including a short cut up a footpath next to the railway to avoid the army checkpoint, while we filmed. The footage gives a fascinating insight into the local area and will be made into a music video and uploaded to YouTube.
Reflections
Beyond the physical outputs of our work, the residency has had a far deeper resonance for our ongoing practice. We are interested in relationships between people, environment and place, so being immersed in the village gave us not only the opportunity to explore and respond to these relationships, but also a chance to relook at the everyday life in Scotland that we take for granted, and to consider issues of sustainability and social justice.
Sri Lanka is classed as a developing country and most people have limited access to mass-produced goods. This has resulted in the prominence of craft, the handmade and the use of hand tools, and as a result skills were highly developed in areas that we in the ‘West’ no longer inhabit. The localness of production and the recycling and reusing of everything was apparent in every aspect of daily life and we constantly marveled at the ingenuity of people in solving everyday problems with limited resources.
Our current practice concerns issues of sustainability and in Sri Lanka most people we met led simpler lives in terms of material wealth due to limited disposable income. Consumerism and corporateness were far less apparent with shorter supply chains – markets, local produce and small shops – and plastic packaging was minimal (see our bag project above) Some of what we saw was inspiring in terms of sustainability, although as a counterpoint there was the sobering fact of local corruption, people working 12 hour days for a pittance while the monks were reputed to be rich on the back of the donations of local people to the temples.
We became aware of the lack of screen culture, which we now take for granted here. It was interesting to be in the company of people without the constant checking of texts and emails, to look out of bus windows rather than down at screens and notice that chatting and smiling were the main way of passing the time when travelling. People did have mobile phones, but generally not smart phones, and it was rare to see a computer anywhere apart from print shops. (Most houses had old style TV’s with snowy reception mostly showing soaps and cricket)
In offices, records were generally still kept by hand (piles of files everywhere) and the clatter of old typewriters could be heard in solicitor’s offices. We loved being reminded of the hand made, the hand annotated, the handwritten; the individual ways of doing things before the sanitization of computers.
We also realized that a lot of the details that we loved, were noticed but not fully understood, the density of the culture differences and language barrier often being impenetrable.
In some ways there was a sense of liberation as we were released from the usual health and safety constraints in our culture. We hopped on and off moving buses and were crushed into trains. We marveled at the bare wires sticking out of the light over the bathroom sink and the way people balanced on top of walls and fences (and even a 4th floor window ledge) to carry out repairs. Being out of the usual cushion of rules and safety regulations and taking risks was challenging but exhilarating – a really useful component in exploring our own response to a different culture and place.
The residency was a fantastic opportunity for professional development and allowed us time to make new work, but we also wanted to look at our practice in a different context and this meant questioning our presence there. We tried to look critically at what we were doing; was our work relevant? How could / should our work engage with the local community? Would anyone be interested? Would our time there been better spent working more with local community projects? Our discussions were useful and contributed to the work that we made. We were heartened by the response to the community showing event that we held in our garden, and by the fact that so many people made a point of coming to wish us goodbye and asked us to come back.
Being in Sri Lanka was such an intense experience that we are still dreaming about it. We are left with images of the friendliness, gentle politeness and kindness of the people we met, the extreme heat, humidity and feeling of being submerged, the vibrant colours, the constant abundance of fruit and flowers, the intensity and immediacy of life, and the crazy, surreal encounters and absurd happenings which made us constantly laugh and which have permanently penetrated our everyday reality now we are back in Scotland.
We feel energized by our time in Sri Lanka and have been excited to get back to our ongoing projects with new outlooks and (perhaps) new understandings.
Our confidence in our areas of work and interest (socially engaged practice) has been reaffirmed and challenged in equal measure by the residency. It’s difficult to sum up the experience; perhaps the words of the oddly worded advertising for an electronics shop in Colombo do the job – “ Nothing Like Anything”
Brooms
My final days in Hikkaduwa were spent trying to resolve the matter of 72 old brooms that on their return from Colombo had no home. I felt that the work should be a complete cycle, in which I had exchanged these objects as a mechanism for meeting people, building relationships and learning something of daily life here and that therefore the brooms should also be used in my response to the understanding I had gained. I worked initially with photographic work I had made, creating portraits for each brush, playing with their qualities as these slightly humorous faces with bad hair days. I was interested in the very simple connection between a mundane every day object and something that makes us laugh a little. I explored how the pictures worked printed in passport photo style and then I made a simple pack of snap cards with them. I liked the idea of returning the images back into something you might interact or play with and in a form that requires you to really look and observe the individual differences of each broom head. I made several packs of cards to distribute in the village.
I had also a chance meeting and interesting conversation with a screen printer at the very end of our road, who had learnt the skill through one of the aid projects that was offered by European organisations during the Tsunami. Like the lace maker his skill was now used to run a business with in tourism and I spoke with him about my broom images. As another experiment I designed a screen print using some of the broom portraits and we printed these onto fabric, which I then sewed into tea-towels. I was trying to play with both the tea-towel as this object that is strongly connected to British tourism and European daily household life. I gave these tea-towels as gifts when I left to some of my neighbours.
For the physical brushes I designed a few simple structures to create which allowed them to somehow infiltrate back into the community and to react to ideas that originated during my time learning about the village. I made a set of cricket stumps for the boys who play cricket at the end of our garden every day. I also made a shop sign for the lady who runs a tiny wee stall and a guest room in the house opposite us, the place is barely visible. A bundle of de-headed broom handles were bundled up and donated to the local community project run by our neighbour who was setting up new premises in one of the neighbours’ gardens. These were going to be used to create the fence for the perimeter of this dance hall. The remaining brooms were joint together to make the Skelton shape of an enormous umbrella. Shade and shelter is something I have learnt is extremely valuable in the village and the climate. For an afternoon I opened up the garden gate to invite some of the local kids and families to help add colourful fabric to this shape before hoisting it up into our tree. The location for it, was chosen to directly shadow the round concrete platform in our garden above the water supply. Addressing the space above this circle in this way completely changed the platforms function; it became a social space to gather under and to sit in a round.
These days of activity ended with an evening collaboration between the other artists, Jo and Robbie that I lived with. We tensioned a bed sheet into the space at the front of our house porch and as dusk came on the final night, we organised a projection of two animations onto this screen, very large and visible from the road and our open gate. For my animation I showed a sequence of the broom portraits and Jo and Robbie made a beautiful and fun visual using paper flip flops and flowers, accompanied by some energetic music. We also placed kerosene lamps around tables and under the broom shelter with packs of the broom playing cards and cups of juice and biscuits. Many of the neighbours came and lots of them bringing children. The young men sat for the whole evening in a circle under the umbrella structure, playing cards by lamp light. The women took up positions on the chairs, watching the animations while the children grew steadily more hyper with the sugar, but between dancing huddled around the lamps to play with the cards.
It was a perfect exhibition to conclude such a colourful intergrated stay in Sri-Lanka.
The Colombo Biennale
The Colombo Biennale, Srilanka’s Art festival celebrates its third edition this year (2014), including around 50 artists from both Srilanka and internationally. It was an opportunity for all of us to share something from our projects so far and to meet some other really inspiring and interesting people. In a way to also understand where contemporary art sits, how it is understood and represented in Sri Lanka. For me perhaps the challenge felt to be making work for a gallery context, which I have not done in the last years. Therefore in submitting two pieces for the CAB festival was a chance for me to revisit my stance on this from of representation as well as really exciting for meeting and sharing ideas with local artists etc.
I presented the outcomes so far of two of the ideas that I had been exploring here in Hikkaduwa, the brooms and the mobile museum. At this stage having spent a little more time understanding how things happen here, my ideas for the lace project have been put a little in prospective. It wasn’t interesting enough to me to just present a giant piece of woven lace as an object without the process of making it being resolved as the centre of the work. To organise, choreograph and teach a large group of children or people to make lace as a performance would have been really exciting but an enormous challenge time wise and depending on a lot of other people and teachers to assist me. I began to wonder if it might be just as interesting to keep this idea for another time, a transfer of the skill, take it back to its colonial roots and re-teach people in Portugal or Britain a skill they took over to Sri Lanka. In some way my thoughts on this idea helped me to see that the residency and potentially all the processes or activities we might engage with here don’t need to have a definite start point that leads to a continuous linear process reaching a conclusion at the end of the residency. Some ideas perhaps can drift, be carried for some time until they feed into or fall into a place where they make better sense.
Lace
I made the decision however that there was regardless of this a lot of value in continuing to learn the skill and spend time with Indra the lace maker. We were becoming friends and through the hours of sitting side by side, taking up the whole shop I was not only learning of her craft and her life, but gaining a fascinating prospective on one of the areas of life here that fascinates me, the arrival of tourism. Almost being on the other side of this, watching the interactions take place and experiencing the shop keeper’s commentary and opinion on this became really insightful. At this point I also thought about the fine or invisible line between something being art and being life or an experience in a place. I realised that what took place during the time with Indra was an exchange; I was the first tourist who she had ever taught this skill too, she was co-incidentally a wonderful teacher and she took much delight and patience in guiding me. She was one of 5 daughters who was taught lace making by their mother, who learnt from her mother, and Indra was the only daughter who worked with it still, her own daughter didn’t want to learn, she was studying a degree in Colombo, Indra’s family line of the craft was possibly near its end.
Brushes
So, my collected and well used brooms, all 72 of them by now, made their way to Colombo for the Biennale. Several of my neighbours watched them pile into the back of the van. I realised that the brooms had created a sense of mystery – where were they going? and for what? On my return one man came up to me and asked – ‘my broom – Colombo going?’ he was delighted when I said yes. I also became aware of a bigger potential for this group of brooms, on holiday in Colombo that could work in some really interesting political fields, beyond the exhibition, trips to sit outside parliament. The brooms were not just objects, they were each echoed by a family in the village who once owned them and was curious to know their whereabouts.
I felt consistently throughout the exhibition that Colombo was just a pause, a chance to share a sense of prospective with a different audience, a short period of time to stand back and observe the brushes simply as they were, a collection of objects before they returned to their village. I wasn’t interested to make anything with them in the gallery, just to let them rest, to stand strongly together as the community they represented, some young, some old, a few resting on others.
I am often think that it is important for public art and socially engaged art to find ways to re-present themselves with in the institutions of art and have a voice with in the larger question of what art is today. However I did not try to tell the story of the brushes and perhaps this was a weakness to my point on having them there. However I was interested that it allowed people to make their own connections and narratives, which was relevant in the context of Sri Lanka where these objects are so familiar.
I enjoyed working more sculpturally with these sticks and their bristles, to stack them in a way that created a sense of movement and to take time to consider the finer details of presenting them, however although I still hold no regret at not building or making something more of these in this place, I was consistently aware of my own inclination that they should have some form of interaction. I did witness two moments of interaction with the work, one was a beautiful piece of improvised dance, by Tom one of the other resident artists which to me addressed the energy I was trying to capture in their configuration as a group, posed in sweeping position. The other was during install when I was informed that the ‘minor staff’ would come to sweep the gallery before the opening, two ladies came in with brushes identical to mine and myself an couple of others joined them with my brushes to clean the floor, everyone was smiling and laughing.
I realised many things that as a piece in a gallery the brushes gave a chance to reflect on, connotations that within the community context were harder to observe. Their relationship to class, to female roles, to the immediate natural environment they were created out of.
Washed up object/a mobile museum
An experience I shall never forget was the making of the mobile museum. A structure to contain the objects I had gathered from the beach, but also a prototype or design idea for an object carried on your back, that could function both as a space to collect and interrogate the landscape, and also present a temporay museum display; on a road side curb or with in a community setting.
I was really lucky to be put in contact with a Tuc tuc driver who also had a very small workshop from which he ran a metal and wood working business during the off season period. His name was Anil and he was happy not just to make the piece I had invented but to let me be part of the making process. It became apparent later that this was a strange territory as although local women are often engaged in very physical manual work, it was not wood or metal work at this scale and for a westerner to be doing this was even stranger. Together we collected pieces of wood and metal that we strapped precariously to the roof of his tuc tuc. When we went to his friends who had machines to cut pieces, we found they were sitting through a power cut and so the museum was hand cut and hand assembled. We invented the mechanisms and attachments together, adapting pieces from his wonderful pile of scrap metal and off cuts. The process was punctuated by regular trips to his home to have cups of tea and lunch with his wife and children. Although I never imagined it from the onset, again, like the lace making, the relationships and social experiences that derived from this process became as interesting and special to me as the outcome. I was invited to spend Independence days with his wife’s whole extended family, where we swam in the sea together in Galle and showered then all in the street under and stand pipe before dinner.
The other piece I presented for the Colombo Biennale festival was therefore this work. In the Garden space of Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations, my resistance to working indoors and my original design for the mobile museum to be a work encountered on the street led me to choose a space here at the side of a small road under the shelter of a tree. I presented my collection of objects salvaged from the beach outside Hikkaduwa, in a particular way that played with colour and partnered pieces of similar form that were natural and manmade materials alongside each other. I was interested in exploring the processes and order we try to give to the natural world as a means to make sense of it, or to find beauty in landscapes that are about a persistent destruction, such as life was for these pieces in the tide. I realised that this project reflects on the similarity between my methodology as an artist encountering a new culture and the comparable inquisition of early explorers. Examining and excited by all of the virtually invisible details and fragments of place that are so unfamiliar, vibrant in colour and wrapped in social, environmental and historical layers. Interested in landscapes that often contrast with what today is expected of a tourist to find beautiful.
I also realised, looking at the work with a distance to its starting point, that the work was inescapably referencing my reaction to what I learnt and observed of the Tsunami. Trying to create some kind of order and narrative to understand the kind of power, well and beyond our control, that is contained in that incredible ocean. Considering the piecing together and re-building of physical and emotional space, searching and re-structuring that has taken place for the 10 years following this disaster. The presentation of the idea as a museum was about my thoughts towards our relationship to history and to knowledge, how we preserve and also connect the present day with what has taken place before. This museum and collection attempts to operate outside of the institutional walls, as a display space it is open to the elements and to constant re-configuration, no glass and no fixtures. It is not an attempt to preserve but to momentarily capture and reflect. As an idea it is about the potential for different people in different times and places to use the materials gathered from their space and environment to curate and tell their own histories through an exploration of what remains today, opening this up in public spaces for wider conversations.
On reflection of this connection to the Tsunami I felt that the work was perhaps a little too sensitive to display in Hikkaduwa or the place that the objects originated.
The place: Hikkaduwa
My 10th day in Sri Lanka ended with spicy chickpeas wrapped in newspaper, a procession of flaming coconut torches, and thirty or so elephants rather uncomfortably dressed in elaborate textiles and twinkling blue fairy lights. We had joined thousands of people for the annual Kelani Duruthu Maha Perahera festival, unforgettably colourful and musical, elegant dancing and hundreds of performances with fire, ribbons, peacocks and spinning plates. This was followed by a hilarious three hour comedy sketch as we tried to navigate our way home, completely trapped by the parade and thousands of people and families. It was an incredible introduction to Colombo which followed an exciting meeting with the team for the Colombo Biennale and an exploration of some of the venues with them, beginning to map out possible outdoor sites and gallery spaces that could suit our art work for the festival.
Now I have returned to the slightly more peaceful Hikkaduwa by climbing on and standing a little too cosily, just managing to balance on a busy commuter train. These first 10 days have brought an incredible overload of experiences, from kind and warm people, to the sweet young boys playing cricket practically in our garden, to the string of wild dogs lining our road, to eating 10’s of miniature bananas, battling with the mosquitos, visiting temples and budha’s, asking questions and answering smiles, holding difficult conversations about the Tsunami and drinking many delicious cups of tea. Not to mention sleeping to the rattle of monkeys on the roof.
Hikkaduwa where we are all staying is a small town on the beautiful sea, stretched out along a hectic strip of the Galle Road, saturated with shops and stalls, rusty red bicycles and eager but friendly tuc tucs. For its most part every commercial window and doorway is cluttered with garments and objects for sale, locally made and run by Sri Lankan families, but existing exclusively to service the 4 busy winter months of the tourists decent. There is a lot to adjust to and quite a loud and vibrant contrast between a modest local culture and this roads ample supply of contradiction to this, regardless we are inescapably tourists also. The last days however it has been inspiring to meet some folk that integrate with the local community and to begin to have conversations and find moments and mechanisms to form the start of friendships with some of the beautiful Sri Lankan people, which hopefully muddle this line between the two cultures existing here.
We are all in quite a special position because the artists are split between two houses but located ‘jungle side.’ This seems to refer to being the opposite side to most of the hotels, away from the ocean, over the railway track and 10 minutes down a wee and fascinating road under a great green canopy of banana leaves. Each home we pass if you catch someone’s eye you find a lovely smile and in between the glimpses through bushes and doorways a peek into daily village life. Three of us stay in a simple and brilliantly spacious house a fair way along this road, it is raised up a little where the land inclines and is surrounded by a hot green grassy garden. Working outside the front of the house which is a really bright and refreshing treat (most of the time) it feels as though we are on show to the whole street and equally we are spectators of it. The other side of our fence a family of stay dogs defend 4 newly born puppy’s and at 5pm the local boys prop up a broken bit of a palm tree to play jungle cricket, (we can field from our garden) while the kind shop lady opposite waves and greets us constantly. I have begun to find a rhythm to match these surroundings enjoying early mornings at sunrise and the abundance of sounds that accompany it.
Initial Ideas and reactions: Work
I had proposed and imagined to research one starting point here that would take me through to some kind of outcome that stitched this time here together. However finding myself in this incredible situation where removed from the juggling of daily life at home your sole focus is on the development of ideas, absorbing and questioning everything about this new and completely fascinating culture, it doesn’t feel that easy, or necessarily important to fix my focus on just one idea. In the opportunity to live completely submerged in the culture I find my head constantly buzzing with little ideas, details that I feel really inspired by and I get really excited by a whole multitude of things around me. According to this I am allowing my creative process here to follow many of these threads of interest and to play in simple ways with them that respond to my immediate reactions and thoughts about life in Hikkaduwa.
Lace
I was looking forward to concentrating my work here on the role and intricacies of local crafts, in particular I expected to engage a lot with the local tailoring community and the unique situation that exists working in a country like Sri Lanka where you can actually meet the people who make some of the garments we import and wear in the west. The disconnection between maker and consumer is universal but I am interested in the moments of visibility where a connection might be possible. I spent a couple of my first days here mapping and learning about the spread of local textile based activities.
The majority of the shops on our end of Galle road sell westernised summer dresses, trousers, hats, bikinis and board shorts most made from either imported Indian fabrics that offer the silky ornate trim that is popular of Eastern garments, or foreign swim wear cloth. Speaking with some of these local seamstresses in the tourist shops I understand that here there is something quite special existing purely through circumstance, in that these women work in the same place that they sell and therefore the foreign visitors on entry to the shops are met by potentially the same machine and lady that made the garment they are interested to buy. The stitching on old sewing machines, the pattern cutting and wee pile of scraps is entirely visible inside and we even have the opportunity to request something customized and made to measure, through this the local process of tailoring is very tangible. I began to feel that despite my own interest in sewing and it’s wider function socially and economically, in terms of interaction and visibility, there is a system of sorts that is already facilitating some sense of this interface between the local maker and the visitor. What therefore became more of a curiosity to me were the steps in the process that were not so visible; the production of the fabric itself.
To look at this I took myself to see some other local aspects to the textile industry. To see handloom weaving, batik and silk making, even rope makers; beautiful and patient people using extremely delicate processes, the outcomes they produce are stunning and there is something very special about seeing this. However for all the time it was possible to watch these craftmen at work, the trips to these shops or centres were monopolised understandably by far more time dedicated to a detailed tour of their showrooms. Perhaps it was unusual for a visitor to be more interested in how something is made, than buying the perfectly refined outcome. Each of these visits made me more increasingly aware that not only were these venues tailored towards foreign visitors but these textiles were incredibly expensive for local people and high end products that would never find their way into the majority of local homes, they were luxury items for export. Furthermore the garments that Sri Lankan people wear are often stitched here, but the fabrics are imported cheaply from India, China and Japan. The official white school uniform cloth for example, worn by every child in Srilanka is not made in the country.
In trying to articulate this quite complex international network of buying and selling, importing goods, ideas, western designs etc, I stumbled across one tiny shop that stands out a little on the street as it is the only place that sells entirely white garments; the lace shop. The lady here had such a great smile and perhaps I was just at that point in my thought process, trying to articulate these incredibly labour intensive crafts such as hand loom weaving and their relationship to wealth and then to find this tiny machine for making this detailed and perfect lace by hand somehow seamed to encompass many of the things that fascinated me about crafts, economy and labour here.
Lace making in not an indigenous craft for Sri Lanka, nor is handmade lace worn or used that much here, in fact colonial rule during the Portuguese period brought this skill to the west coast of Sri Lanka and shared it with local fisherwomen, who produced impeccable lace that found its way to the royal and rich garments and interior decors or the western world. The craft has remained today, passed on by mother to daughter but the number of practicing lace makers has of course decreased dramatically. Perhaps my curiosity also lingered here because unlike weaving or batik the shear miniature scale and speed of the lace makers left me feeling like there was still a mysterious edge to this process and a labour of incredible patience. My immediate reaction was to want to unpack that mystery, to imagine how this lace might look on a huge scale or as a game like maypole dancing where each person became a bobbin, ducking and diving between each other.
I felt very much that I wanted to learn and engage more with this subject before refining these early excitable ideas and also there were so many questions and subtleties to this whole industry that couldn’t be derived from one or two conversations. The lace maker agreed to teach me, I would come for an hour or so each day and sit inside the shop with her and learn to make lace…
Brushes
There is an absolute abundance of local products made from some part or another of a coconut tree and these are both displayed outside every local shop on the jungle roads and found in all of the Sri Lankan homes. The most common of the coconut items is the indoor floor brush, many families owning more than one and using it at least once a day. The need to brush these concrete floors is evident; the jungle spends all it’s time trying to get inside. We have at least three varieties of ants discovering invisible crumbs and Sri Lankan people take incredible pride in their homes. Many times it is remarked to me ‘how clean is Sri Lanka?!’ The sweeping is a relentless cycle.
The brushes themselves are beautiful objects, a wooden pole with a range of plastic and recycled tin components that hold the coconut fibres into the end, resembling a moustache. I decided to buy one from the local shop and carrying it home I was astonished by how much this made the local people smile. Tourists don’t buy sweeping brushes. But the reaction was such a warm one that I began to think of how actions like walking down the road with a broom are so simple and yet so effective as mechanisms for conversations. Interesting considering the Galle road is so packed with things that are trying to get your attention. I decided to buy a couple more brushes, slight variations but the same indoor natural fibre and whilst wondering how these might look in some form of kinetic sculpture I realised that perhaps since these objects, are quite so local and familiar to my neighbours it might come across to the street of spectators as pretty wasteful and strange to be cutting them up. I also had a really strong feeling for wanting to further my interaction with all these people who live around us in the jungle. Inspired by the quite simple set up of the local shops in the village, window ledges or sheds with items, I placed a sign indicating ‘Broom Swap’ and I made an ordered pile of brand new brooms in a visible place outside our house.
The first exchanges took place with people I had already met, immediate neighbours who found it all quite funny but who were more than happy to make the swap, for a couple of these it was a chance for me to step inside their house or sit for a cup of tea and learn a little of their lifestyle. I chose to use the interior brooms because the interior spaces of these homes are still something of a mystery most of these buildings are penned in by fairly substantial walls or fences. As a few more exchanges took place and word began to spread I began to think more again about these walls. One lunch time 3 women separately came to the big gate of our garden and despite our language barrier they understood this swap and began pushing their old brushes through the fence to me on the other side.
I met one lady who lives in a small and beautiful little house alone as a full time carer for a handicapped daughter; her home is completely cut off from the community by the strong tall walls that surround it. She told me, over a cup of tea how Sri Lanka used to be different and she felt better, only tiny fences or bushes between homes, everything was open and space and life was shared and social. In the 60’s under new leadership the government encouraged many people to go abroad, particularly the Middle East to find work and in the process people saw how we were living and building public and privatisation of space in the west. On return these influences were transferred and the built landscape began to change and the walls and property boundaries became more defined.
Word of the broom swap somehow spread through this neighbourhood like wild fire, a true testament to the close communication and travel of person to person news that still exists here. On one day I even ran completely out of brooms to exchange, I started to buy the brooms from the two closest little shops and when they ran out I noticed they made a new order, these tiny micro economies are fascinating and I felt essential that the swapping supported this. After 5 days I have 22 swapped brooms and have met many new and friendly faces who have shared a bit of time or an invitation into their home with me in the process.
The used brooms are wonderful weathered objects, totally reshaped by the repetitive action of daily brushing, somehow as a collection I no longer want to cut them up, they each have a great presence and identity. I am beginning to experiment with them like giant sticks, thinking about their properties for play and the relationship they might have to simple skeleton structures, the constant building and construction here or the lost presence of a basic garden fence.
Washed up objects
I have always loved collecting pebbles and shells along shorelines and the process of getting totally absorbed in scouring grains of sand, barefoot after barefoot. On one of my first days here in Hikkaduwa I visited the Tsunami Photo museum a few kilometres from the town, assembled in the remains of a ladies house, which had been completely destroyed and slowly rebuilt. There were two things that stayed with me a while after leaving, one being the scale and impact and sheer sadness of the destruction and the second being the approach to the definition of the space as a museum. It was precisely a museum in fact, but with a completely homemade, wonky, hand written style of assemblage that made all the terrible images and descriptive text even more powerful and far away from the expectations of western ordered and graphically designed displays. The exhibition contained not only photographs but letters, objects, fabrics and a glass case with an example of the debris and rubble left over on a tiny piece of land. Speaking to the lady who ran the museum, I also learnt of the changes brought about by this disaster, she explained how everything was put into prospective for a lot of local people, that material pursuits and the whole relationship with possessions and objects changes when you lose everything and yet remain in a place where this could potentially happen again. We also talked of how so many people left this local area and moved inland, they are still afraid and they cannot live by and look at the ocean.
I left the museum which is right at the ocean’s edge and I also changed for some moments the way I was viewing it, I was somehow completely compelled to wonder a bit up the shore here, staring out at this mass of water, trying to imagine what had happened and to articulate the incredible and unstoppable power it contains. At some point the clean and perfect beach was broken by a rock barrier, part of the coastal engineering, on my side of this there were suddenly lots of ripples and clusters of debris washed up in various tidelines, the assortment and fragments were sort of beautiful and ironic and as I couldn’t help myself from picking some out, I realised how much they played sculpturally with each other, the fine structure of piece of broken coral that mirrors in size, shape and colour the bleached plastic dislocated dolls arm. The natural and the man-made, blending into one another, where some objects were literally impossible to categorise, totally unified and at the mercy of the waves and the sea. I almost left my gathered collection on the beach, the connection between these pieces and the larger broken materials left behind by the tsunami at first felt insensitive and inappropriate, however I knew that it wasn’t the destruction of these objects in a negative sense of the term that interested me, rather the beauty in the simplicity of the shapes and colours that these became. These were also from a much more recent time period and talked to me more directly of environmental impact and consumerism and waste.
I went several times out to this section of the beach to gather a handful by handful of these unusual washed up bits, I had no plan for them but this process of gathering became really reflective on this completely empty beach. I guessed that this wave barrier meant that this particular tide line was rounding up a combination of the local litter that dogs and weather moved away from the curbs as well as the inevitable scraps of rubbish from Hikkaduwas beach tourism. In my continued pursuit to understand the relationship and impacts of tourism on this town I found it fascinating that in this very concentrated place evidence of the culture and consumption of both Eastern and Western lifestyles was lying out together here peacefully in the sun in a place completely ignored and unused.
I began to plan to carry cut away bottles and bags for my collections it was becoming almost methodical and I was increasingly aware that my activity shared something in common with the rubbish collectors and range of inventors and resourceful individuals in Sri Lanka that gather, reuse, recycle or recreate objects out of discarded stuff. The only difference which I enjoyed was that I was perhaps at the end of this cycle of gathering and re-making, collecting objects that no longer had any capacity for a future use.
Back at the house it was impossible to resist playing with the finds and ordering and arranging them in different ways. Colour was absolutely key to this because the subtle shift in shades seamed to span precisely the colours of the ocean and in little group’s assortment by tone made the collection really intriguing visually. I decided that I might also like to play with the definition of a museum as an attempt to find an interesting space or mechanism to make this collection public. I was interested in how this whole process of collection and display could become a performance or a mobile process replicated in different places.
Hannah Brackston is a visual artist with a socially engaged practice currently rooted in Glasgow, Scotland. Growing up between Leeds and rural Oxfordshire, she then spent a year working with community educational/development projects in Southern India. Hannah graduated from Environmental Art at The Glasgow School of Art in 2011, receiving the David Harding Public Art Prize and exhibiting at the R.S.A. New Contemporaries Show. Key works include Desire Lines (2011), a permanent artwork in the form of a gateway for Bellahouston Park and Nith Scoping (2012) a research led project that explored the relationship between people and their River Nith, for the program Inbetween:Dumfries. Recently Hannah completed residencies in Cuxhaven Germany, Unit 7 artist’s studios in Glasgow and has an upcoming residency Glasgow Sculpture studios. These are supported by awards from Arts Trust Scotland and The R.S.A. Hannah is one of the founding members of the Open Jar Artist Collective and is building on collaborations with icecream architecture. Currently Hannah works from a studio in Govan, her art invites participation and promotes conversation. Every project is developed in considered relation to research and context, people and environment.
The last bus turned away from the coast, leaving behind the bright white light. The windows became greener and greener and plastic flowers swung above the windscreen as it flew along the turning roads. After several hours it stopped at the bottom of a long steep track and I got off and walked up slowly, past wary eyed dogs sleeping in patches of shade on the path.
I was shown to a dormitory building near to the reserve’s office, and Mr Chitra Sekara arrived shortly after. We didn’t have a big introduction – he just nodded and gestured towards the forest. I put my bags down, put on my boots and we left immediately.
We walked through the dense green almost in silence, with Chitra stopping continually to point out plants, usually calling them by their Latin names as well as Sinhalese. He picked up leaves to put in my book, which became quickly covered in notes and markers so I could find the locations of the plants again. We saw many lizards and a large scorpion, and crushed and smelled the leaves of Cinnamon Zelanicum and Aristolochia Indica – a vine containing aristolochic acid, critical to the survival of some Birdwing butterflies. At some point he turned abruptly and we headed back, and I remembered how quickly the light falls in the forest.
Later, I walked round the edges of the forest close to the dormitory, and sat to draw Osbeckia octandra, a purple-flowered shrub used in the treatment of liver disorders. I stayed there to work for a while but at some point, looked down to see that the tops of my trousers and the ground surrounding me was soaked through with sticky dark blood. I realised that leeches must have gotten inside, and ran back to the dormitory and find the salt that my friends had packed into a paper triangle from the breakfast table that morning.
The dogs here have their own realities. All day they sleep in their shady hiding places, and only in the hours before sunset do they start to appear. As the light faded I washed my clothes clean and they emerged on all sides and took their places on the path towards the forest – stretched out, heads up, relaxed, considering. They leapt up at intervals and begin to fight, all joining in and then settling down again.
Everyone left to bathe before sunset, washing in the river that runs through the forest. The water was clean and we drank from it too. A brother and sister were swimming and washing and as I walked by they saw me and started a diving competition. Flipflops were left on the river bank and on the rocks a collection of belongings: A plate with five small piles of red spice, a plastic bag filled with banana skins, a pair of white trainers with Velcro, a white bucket with a bar of soap beside it on a dip in the rock. I heard a kitten behind a wall and as I peered over to see it a man pointed into the trees and I saw a small black bird with a red beak crying instead.
The sky between the trees turned pink then black like shutters closing. After dark dogs ran laps around and around, panting heavily, sniffing the ground and growling. I fell asleep under a pink mosquito net and they fought through the night.
Each time I entered the forest with Chitra, I found that the mental markers I had constructed were almost entirely useless. The landscape I am familiar with is based on rocks and hills and solitary trees and the density of the forest made it impossible to find such points. Instead I looked at the sky and tried to memorise the patterns that the leaves made against areas of lightness.
First, Elytraria acaulis – small, dark, bluish leaves growing close to the ground. Then we walked further inside the forest, moving slowly and placing our feet carefully, and found Anoectochilus setaceus – an endemic ground orchid with finely veined velvety red leaves, traditionally used to treat snakebites. Chitra placed a protective border of leaves around each plant we found before we left.
Into another valley we were surrounded with Mandura, the pitcher plant Nepenthes distillatoria. It flowered above us – tall stalks of greenish pale flowers, with the huge pitchers beneath, tangling all the way to the ground in various stages of growth and decay. The ground was covered with leeches that make their way up my boots with each step. We both said its name like a mantra as we walked, “mandura, mandura, mandura”.
The light had already dropped on the way out, and as I walked I felt a little curl against my foot. I half turned back and just see a flash of an outline – a tiny snake with its blunt little head raised up. I stopped Chitra and he tutted and pulled me back. Hypnale Hypnale, hump nosed pit viper, it’s colouring was so perfect, that even as I looked directly at it, it seemed to disappear into the path. With its head still reared, Chitra hooked a stick under it, body twisting, and threw it far into the trees and we heard the sound of its body fall in the leaves.
The animals preparing for sunset marked our route out; hornbills and purple faced leaf monkeys and an intensely loud sound of cicadas, like motorbike engines revving in the trees. We saw the marks of a wild boar on the path.
Outside the dormitory after dark I sat with my headtorch and read with the insects and bats swooping at me. Mongooses slept in the roof. The dogs ran, the monkeys were asleep and the sky was filled with green fireflies.
Finally, with some persuasion, I was allowed to go into the forest by myself. But not further than the second Weniwel tree. I found a small stream next to a big mahogany tree that was always filled with the leaf monkeys, and drew the damp earth covered with Acranthera ceylanica and fallen leaves. The day passed with only the monkeys and birds. When the cicadas began I knew it was nearly time to leave.
For several days there were rainstorms in the afternoon, which often stopped work. Once a monkey warned me first, by pissing on me and very nearly on my drawing. When I looked up it was staring down at me. At that moment the sky broke open with a rainstorm and I slid down the paths out of the forest, passing Sunil on a motorbike going up the main path back into the forest to gather leeches – the yellow skinned ones for medicine.
In the early evenings I sat with sugary Nescafe and watched the birds. They appeared during the pauses in the rain, metallic blue flashes against the grey sky and dark trees. Black and yellow beaks, red beaks, a bird of paradise with a long black and white tail – I had no knowledge of the species so everything was reduced to movement and colours. Once the director of the reserve came with his family, and we played badminton at sunset as it rained down until we couldn’t see the shuttlecock in the air anymore.
After dark at night, we went back into the forest again. Chitra, Sunil, myself and another forester who wanted to find snakes. The shadows of the trees were lit only by fireflies and we moved very quietly using red light head torches. Chitra stopped us, pointing to small set of red spots shining back from the trees. As we walked, the trees revealed many more small shadows. Sometimes we shone our torches on full beam and saw huge round eyes illuminated. It was the endemic slender loris (Loris tardigradus), tiny and exquisitely beautiful, clinging to the trees and turning their heads to stare at us. A small owl sat close to us for a long time – the rare endemic Serendib Scops owl, Otus thilohoffmanni.
On the leaves of the trees sleeping kangaroo lizards, Otocryptis wiegmanni, hung suspended. They held on tightly with their hands, with their white bellies exposed and legs and tails gently swinging below. I kept shining my torch in the ditches to look for frogs and insects. We found another snake, pale orange and shining, too fast to catch but we watched it climb far into the trees above our heads, then walked slowly out, with our torches off then because our eyes had adjusted to the light.
Lindsay Sekulowicz is an artist based between London and Scotland.
She completed her Ba (Hons) at the Glasgow School of Art in the department of Environmental Art and attained a postgraduate diploma at the Prince’s Drawing School in London.
In her practice, Sekulowicz focuses on historical collections and biological studies. The consideration for material and form is fundamental to all of the works. Primarily, she works through drawing, painting and sculptural installations, utilising often basic and instinctive techniques, with time, study and looking being important factors in the making process.
In the past, Sekulowicz has worked with entomologists from the Museum of Natural History of Florence, Museo ‘LA SPECOLA’, travelling with them on two expeditions to jungles in Malaysia and Ecuador.
In 2012 she completed a residency at the D’Arcy Thompson Zoology Museum at the University of Dundee, where her research was focused on neuroscientific studies of space and memory.
Most recently, she has been working with botanist from the University of Addis Ababa and Kew Gardens, compiling a series of drawings of Ethiopian medicinal plants.