The silent scream
In her 10th exhibition at Barefoot Gallery Nelun Harasgama gives viewers her poignant interpretation of Samsara – the eternal cycle of birth, existence and death. With her oil and charcoal series, she challenges her viewers to consider why humanity continues to wound, destroy and then mourn without ever learning from the error of our ways.
As I skirt the familiar walls of the Barefoot Gallery which have long been accustomed to displaying so many works of this prolific artist, they seem to embrace the soft white canvases, so synonymous with Nelun’s work as though they were old friends. The artist herself joked with me that her audiences must think she has no money to afford colour paints because she always works in white.
But though the backgrounds are softly muted with cream and taupe hues, they belie a sadder subject matter – the endless cycle of suffering that we eternally find ourselves locked into. Samsara is the name of this 10th exhibition by Nelun and it is a clever exhibition. It does not allude to the religious tropes that are so often used to describe this concept. Instead, the artist uses her canvas to reflect philosophically on why we must endure this cycle of pain.
Using a combination of nameless, faceless figures in some works she cleverly juxtaposes her insightful study of the body language of people in pain and mourning with a series of portraits of elderly women whose resigned stares convey the pain of lives long lived. The suffering of Samsara here is not stereotypical – it is not overt. Instead, it is the insidiously subtle forms of suffering that we all endure so chronically that we barely notice the damage they cause.
In her painting “Could you come with me please,” we witness the vulnerability of an elderly figure embarking on a journey and we feel their anxiety at not being able to make it alone. Behind stands another figure, whose stance conveys the stress of indecision and confusion – should they accompany the older person? Perhaps it is not their journey to make? In another work, entitled “Resting” we see a seated figure whose ‘closed’ posture is anything but restful. Feet turned inwards and hunched shoulders with arms crossed at the wrists show a woman turning in on herself, trying to shut herself off from the world.
Nelun at the exhibition opening on Thursday. Pix by Nilan Maligaspe
It is the negative form of peace that we constantly live in that is being shown here. We may not be directly at war, but we continue to destroy – ourselves, each other, our planet and our future generations with our actions, and then perpetuate further suffering as we mourn our losses. To Nelun, this Samsara is a quietly screaming one. “Suffering is all around us, in our consciousness, and in our genes. We carry suffering within us even if we have never suffered in our lives.”
She describes her paintings as “news flashes” – impartial headlines designed to arouse people’s interest without any personal agenda on her part.
“For the past 25 years, disappearances have attracted me, whether it be of time, the environment or people,” she says.
With a BA in Visual Communications from Trent University in Nottingham, UK, Nelun has been exhibiting her work over 30 years. Her first exhibition was in 1994 at the Hermitage Gallery in Colombo. Although she modestly describes herself as a “mother, painter and cook”, it is easy to see from the construction of the compositions Nelun’s talent as a multi-disciplinary designer who works in fashion, textile design and visual arts.
Her design prowess is demonstrated in her serigraph and acrylic on paper series in the Samsara exhibition. It shows how adept she is at playing with different formats to explore the impact of different materials on her subject matter. Painting her faceless figures into the depths of photographed buildings where they stand hauntingly under real thatched roofs and watch us from behind the bars of a metal gate, she cleverly brings a further dimension to the endless silent suffering that permeates our surroundings. It makes me wonder what they would say to me if they could speak. Would they know their suffering? Would they have learned from it? Or would their suffering just disappear in the folds of everyday life as it does for so many? Would it be nothing more than the silent scream that Nelun Harasgama’s work challenges us to consider.
The exhibition will run until October 13.
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