Young artist from the North explores questions of identity and belonging
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Hema Shironi
As a child, her family often moved from one place to another and she found herself questioning the bonds that communities and individuals make. In ‘Rented Shadow and Neighbours’, her exhibition now on at the Saskia Fernando Gallery, the artist Hema Shironi explores her community’s historical and lived experience of colonization and civil war.
This questioning was driven by the difficulty of answering what it truly meant to belong somewhere.
Her debut exhibition at the Saskia Fernando Gallery this month presents a body of work that delves into the artist’s complex understanding of migration, displacement and identity. Her art combines embroidery, mythological imagery, bricolage and installation.
Focusing on the human and universal aspects of conflict, her work is driven by the nostalgia of the numerous places she has called home and how each community belonging to those places grapples with concerns of language, culture, memory, myth, gender and equality.
A notable element underpinning much of Hema’s work is a gridded structure that permeates her compositions. Appearing as threads and partitions, they often contain the sculptures and installations of her interdisciplinary work. In ‘Erasing Flag and Mended Fences’, this method of working touches on the grand narratives of history, mythology and religion. National flags and religious imagery are dissected to reveal not just similar structural principles but the uncertainties that bring them together in the first place.
Hema Shironi, Mended Fences, 2019, Stitched on Printed Paper, 107cm x 244cm
She uses cartography to reveal the trauma that remains embedded in the landscapes of the North. The use of red coloured thread has the distinct effect of suggesting collective trauma and violent memories. Hema’s maps are the veins and capillaries that carry blood throughout the body of her work, along the many roads that hold the memories of its maker. This anatomical connection between body and landscape is positioned deep within Rented Shadows and Knowing and Unknowing Memories – the latter being a photographic installation of everyday meals and snacks replaced with an embroidered selection of maps, one of which reads: Kilinochchi, the heart and peace of hope. Here, in the presence of the snaking blood red string that occupies portions of the other maps, the artist reveals a convoluted desire for reunification of mind and soul, land and body.
The symbolism of blood is a recurring point of reference in Hema’s work as it features consistently in the history of the land. In Window Scape, a red landscape appears behind the everyday sight of clothes hanging out to dry. The nature of domestic life is presented as a vault of memories in Buried Alive Stories, where household objects are transformed in the aftermath of a destructive event. These bloodied threads draw together the omnipresence of wartime trauma which reaches out and transforms everything it comes into contact with.
Rented Shadow and Neighbours sheds light on the obscure issues of identity that stem from historically marginalized communities in a visually layered narrative.
Hema Shironi’s exhibition will be on at the Saskia Fernando Gallery. No. 41, Horton Place, Colombo 7 from10 a.m. to 6 p.m. It ends on November 1
Hema Shironi, Buried Alive Stories, 2020, Embroidery on Cloth, 95cm x 104cm