Filling a void through micro-drawings
Paintings from her latest exhibition Fragments. Pix by Priyanka Samaraweera
Thabendran Krishnapriya’s canvases tell a poignant story. The gentle artist sits in the Barefoot Garden Café and casts back to the Jaffna of her youth.
She was born within the maws of ethnic trouble in 1987, and her sick mother was to die when Priya was barely three months. It was that shattering event that sprung this youngest daughter into the artistic universe with an incredible journey back to the womb told in the arid colours of Jaffnapatam.
Her latest exhibition – delicate canvases that look like patterns made of microscopic roe or caviar, titled Fragments is now on at the Barefoot Gallery.
Krishnapriya’s mother died because there was no healthcare available in a land blighted by war. From the tenderest age she felt the void of not having a mother’s love while everyone around her seemed to have that privilege.
Her father worked in a letter press in the city but he too was to pass away, leaving a busy grandmother to look after little Priya. She had little time for the sensitive precocious granddaughter.
Thabendran Krishnapriya
Whenever she wanted to say something to her grandmother little Priya would draw it. Whether she was bubbling to come out about a new friend or a new kind of food she had eaten, she would draw.
Inspiration to be a professional artist came from the then more culturally rich South after 2009, when T. Sanathanan, that seminal guru in the North (professor and Head, Department of Fine Arts, University of Jaffna) brought down professional artists to the campus where Priya was a wide-eyed undergraduate.
As an adult her art coalesced into her longing for a mother. Art to Priya is autobiographical so where to start but with the time when she was snug in her mother’s womb?
Through her paintings she says, “I created my cells – tissues, membranes, one by one. Then I can feel a mother’s love, because a mother passes everything through the cells.
“Cells have their own energy – so I am creating my own cells and membranes.” The portraits of tissues and membranes connect her to her mother, the person she would think of while staring forlornly at friends whose parents cajoled and petted them.
Her first exhibition on this theme titled Membranes was held in 2018 at the Saskia Fernando Gallery.
It was while doing her MFA in Beaconhouse National University in Lahore that Priya got the idea of creating art through a microscope, a favourite lab tool at school.
Her micro-drawings called ‘arbitrary doodling’ by her Pakistani mentor Ali Raza are intricate and have their own organic beauty. Even one dot when put under the microscope takes on a myriad forms and this is what Priya loves.
She says, “I think of art and science as two sides of a coin. My experiments look at how we can see art through the microscope. My question is, if we can see art through the naked eye why not through the microscope?”
Today Priya, a widely exhibited artist nationally and internationally, is experimenting to stretch the perimeters of her art and teaches part-time. Her husband K. Thabendran is also a professional artist.
Fragments will be on at the Barefoot Gallery until July 23, Monday to Saturday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Searching for an ideal partner? Find your soul mate on Hitad.lk, Sri Lanka's favourite marriage proposals page. With Hitad.lk matrimonial advertisements you have access to thousands of ads from potential suitors who are looking for someone just like you.