No vase is to stand without a doily, a frill is not complete without a lace edge, and the sideboard is compulsory for the dining room, not forgetting the plane glass panes that will give the visitor an eye full of all that crockery stored in for generations - too good to be used at all.

Jumping into mother’s Pettagama or grandma’s Almayrah one can enter into this world collected and preserved for generations. Of course, one must nose through layers of dust or mildew and combat that odd cockroach. It is in deed a novel idea that these objects can be used for works of art.

In the works that will be seen at the exhibition “In the Entangled Web” at the Barefoot Gallery in Colombo, Anoli Perera uses lace, beads, broken porcelain, thread and embroidery and even her mother’s wedding photo as raw material to weave a kind of “web” placing the female at the center. The artist comments: “I see the woman as that spider. She weaves her complex net of social, economic and cultural relationships around her. It becomes her safety net as well as the nurturing cocoon of the family to which she is bound”.

After experimenting with car parts as media for her exhibition  “Vehicle Named Woman” in 1998, Anoli, deals with even more unconventional material. At times pieces of old  lace embroided heavily with beads and sequins cover the female body that she creates with wire mesh, and at times they form a web to hold  the central figures in space. Surprisingly, these faces reminds one of Rukada figures and even some Kolam masks seen in the Low Country folk theater. It seems that Anoli does not want to portray a real woman, but show her more as an effigy that appears to be a puppet of certain strands of thinking and hiding her real self behind the mask that society expects her to wear. The neat well kept house with a multitude of accessories form the women’s own world, just as mother and grandmother would have liked to be.

Of course, through this feeling of being “webbed in” the woman would be able to establish her family based identity which she might need to survive in our highly hierarchical and rapidly changing society. She may in short feel secure. Cutting off the strands of this web that hold her could mean a loss of identity within the community or becoming  marginalized.

Towards the latter part of the 19th century, when a certain amount of affluence entered the upper class Ceylonese houses and domestics attended to the chores, the housewife had more time at her disposal. The education she received at the convent or missionary school concentrated in making her a good housewife, who is also able to knit, crochet, do embroidery or screen painting.

Even before marriage, needles and paint brushes were kept busy, to make that trousseau the most perfect one. Flowered monograms appeared on bed linen, towels and serviettes. European foliage was carefully traced from the “pattern books” that belonged to mother on an aunt. Although these items could be bought at a low price or a “sewing girl” could have been employed to attend to this work more professionally, the “bride” or the housewife took pride in her creations.  All in all, it was to ensure that “idle hands” will not be “up to evil”!

Seeing the woman “as that spider who weaves her complex net of social, economic and cultural relationships around her”, Anoli goes beyond the legacy from convent education handed down for generations. The annual pirith ceremony and dane, the pilgrimage or celebration of New Year, Pongal, Ramazan or Christmas, when the family met at the maha gedara, show how the mechanisms of this web worked. Organizing village labor to prepare vast amounts of food, the know how which would inform to whom which job had to be allocated and supervising all operations was held firmly in the center where the “spider” had her influence. Even who should be invited and who should be left out, was a decision from the central authority. All these family gatherings were planned on models seen at more respected maha gedaras – often they were copies seen at the mothers or aunts house, where every minute detail was attended to and ritual played a most vital role. It was not surprising that one felt “at home” when allured into this web. Not following the cultural pattern would mean being regarded as a strange person – “amutu ekkenek”. The feeling of being “entangled in the web” and the urge to represent these values of being a good wife and mother become leit motivs in Anoli’s exhibition.

In our present globalized context, values seem to have changed: Even in villages, catering services provide the food for weddings and danes and “home cooked food” is fast loosing its halo. Each income group can avail itself of accessories like lace and doilies ranging from the pavement to air-conditioned emporiums where P. V. C imitations and machine reproductions are readily available.

Sentimental values attached to these items handed down for generations too seem to deteriorate like the bonding between generations. Anoli does not attempt to create a musee sentinmentale at the Barefoot Gallery. Her woks of art would help the visitor to rethink the “web” and the feeling of being secure in that “cocoon” as well as the inherent restrictions of this web.

The exhibition will be at the Barefoot Gallery, Galle Road , Bambalapitiya, from 12th to 27th May 2001.