Introduction: Politics of documenting women artists

When I recently asked a friend to comment on Sri Lankan women artists, the response I got was “do women artists in Sri Lanka contribute to the main issues of the country or are they the representatives of the woman’s burden?”  To me, this question illustrates three things.  The first is that it questions the role of Sri Lankan women artists within art history from the perspective of a particularly male paradigm; one of situating women’s preoccupations outside of ‘the main issues of the country’. The second is an indication of the way women’s art has been looked at and understood or misunderstood. The third is a positioning of women artists’ agency as being the carries of the ‘women’s burden’ that implies a restrictive and almost tragic situation.
 I would ideally like to look in-depth at women artists who have been working from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day in Sri Lanka keeping the above points in mind. However, the general unavailability of in-depth research into the lives and art practice of women artists who lived in an era that predated my time (early and mid 20th century) prevents me from commenting on them other than somewhat briefly and on a speculative level. Therefore, my essay concentrates more on discussing contemporary women artists and their practice with which I am more familiar. I would put forward some of my observations on issues, anxieties, boundaries, limitations and interventions that have or seemed to have influenced and defined the art practice of Sri Lankan women artists in the present.
The question above posed by my friend also reminded me of some of the writings of Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock. Before investigating the situation of Sri Lankan women artists, I would like to place in context some of the core arguments of these writings as they focus on certain feminist considerations that would also help me organize my own discussion.  Linda Nochlin has cautioned us on the pitfalls of trying to find ‘female Michealangelos’, as she aptly points out that the criteria of greatness was already male defined (Pollock 1988: 1). Following the same line of thought, Pollock writing on feminist interventions in the histories of art, ponders on the futility of merely adding the names of women artists to art history. If such an activity is to take place within the existing art historical discourse, then one faces the danger of invariably getting into the trap of evaluating women’s art using “art history’s typical procedures and protocols- studies of artists (the monographs), collections of works to make an oeuvre (catalogues raisonnes), questions of style and iconography, membership in movements and artists’ groups, and of course the questions of quality” (Pollock 1988: 1). Therefore, the frequently asked question, ‘why have there been no great female artists’ which is basically a summarized version of the earlier question posed by my friend, should only be considered as a point of departure for a more substantial feminist critique of the art discipline, its ideological limitations, biases, inadequacies and the conventions of art historical writing. I would proceed in my discussion of women artists and their practice to present a collection of ideas keeping these initial cautions in mind, rather than comment on the overall history of women artists and their relevance to the art historical discourse in Sri Lanka.

In 2000, I curated the exhibition titled ‘Reclaiming Histories: A Retrospective Exhibition of Women’s Art ¹ . It documented artworks of 40 women artists from the past and present.  This exercise was a result of my growing concern over the lack of representation of women artists’ work in the public domain and enthusiastically trying to do something about it. In some ways, Pollock might not have fully approved of this kind of exercise, reminding me of the futility of merely adding names of women artists to art history. My artist friend and colleague Jagath Weerasinghe expressed another concern when he declared to me “you are putting hobby artists and sundry painters who have mostly (probably) worked in comfortable, middle class environments on the same platform as you, who have taken every risk in doing the kind of work you do. Don’t you think you are undermining all the struggles and anxieties you have undergone and ironing them out and leveling all differences between you and them?” In many ways, Weerasinghe’s question reminds us of art history’s typical procedures and protocols of judging the validity of art and credibility of artists that Pollock also refers to above where artists need to be in the public, intervening, positioning themselves in the forefront of movements and as initiators of change, producing monumental art and dealing with universal concerns etc. Conventionally, women’s domain has been in the private and most women artists’ work has been done in between their regular family chores, in makeshift studios in confined spaces as very personal exercises. Their themes are centered mostly on their lives and home environment. Should they be merely categorized and dismissed as hobby painters?      
While I take both these criticisms very seriously and accept their individual arguments as valid, I must assert that the whole exercise of the exhibition cannot be dismissed mostly as a misdirected feminist intervention of an overly enthusiastic woman artist who was trying to unearth a ‘female tradition’ of art-making in the country. To understand the strength and logic of the exhibition, it has to be viewed as a starting point to look at the art practice of women artists and to systematically study the social and cultural conditioning that defined their ways of art-making and their participation and non participation in the larger discourse of art. On the other hand, by recognizing the art produced by women artists as part of a home-making exercise and the micro statements they made recording the moments of their personal lives through their art itself endorses a different evaluation procedure and protocols of recognition that allows art to be judged differently. As such, by adding names of women artists to the art history itself has a subversive element promoting change in the way one looks at art. This unsettles the settled landscape of art historical discourse.  If one considers Sri Lankan art as an archeological site, the exhibition above was probably the first dig that tried to unearth the relics of an unknown or little known facts of a species. What is also evident here is that we still have much to unearth, and my reservation to comment on the entire history of women artists is based precisely on this somewhat incomplete state of relevant knowledge.

Art Historical Contexts

In order to read the work and influences of women artists in Sri Lanka, it is imperative to briefly outline some of the relevant historical contexts within which they worked and where their body of works might be situated. The historical evolution of recent Sri Lankan art contains three clear epistemic breaks. First, when the British colonial rulers introduced the easel painting tradition to the local elite in the late 19th Century, it created an entirely new approach to art-making and opned up new hierarchies in the creative act of art-making. In this context, the existent local traditional art was categorized as ‘craft’ and decorative art thereby relegating them to a lower echelon. This marks the beginning of a post traditional art practice which was largely shaped by the influence of academic realism, romanticism and orientalism. The second epistemic break occurred with the 43 Group that initiated an approach to art that was against academic realism and orientalist tendencies prevalent in art at the time. The 43 Group’s most significant achievement was “rephrasing a selected number of modernist trends and artistic approaches that flourished in France in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, giving rise to a distinctively Sri Lankan modernist art” (Weerasinghe 2005: 181). In the background of the national struggle for independence, the 43 Group’s attempt was viewed as an anti-colonial stance. Some of the main proponents of the 43 Group, Lionel Wendt, George Keyt, Lionel Daraniyagala and Ivan Peries² , each marked the boundaries of Sri Lankan modernism through their work. Through his photography, Wendt explored and celebrated the eroticism hidden in the native bodies boldly and uninhibitedly, taking a surrealist approach that did not fit in with the Victorian morality and constrained sensuality of the academically trained painter. Keyt dovetailed a cubist pictorial language with an orientalist sensibility, mythological thematics and motifs creating a sense of a localized modernist idiom.  Referring to the 43 Group’s artists, Weerasinghe notes that “the works of Justin Daranaiyagala and Ivan Peries represented the two extremes of the group’s expressionist trends. The intense and complex psychological dispositions portrayed in Deraniyagala’s works subtly explore and reveal the tragedy and irony of the human condition, while the symbolic and meditative landscapes of Ivan Peries suggest extreme tranquility and compassion” (Weerasinghe, 2005: 181). The third epistemic break came with the emergence of a socio-critical art that is now identified as the ‘90s Trend’. In the background of the highly volatile socio-political environment, the ethnic conflict between sections of the Sinhala and Tamil populations involved armed aggression while the left-oriented youth insurrection spearheaded by the Janatha Vumukti Peramuna (JVP) unleashed waves of political violence hitherto inexperienced in the southern parts of the country in terms of scale and brutality. At the same time, the effects of globalization and its lures opened up an entirely new set of social and cultural anxieties, particularly among the youth. In this complex and volatile context, a whole new generation of artists situated themselves as protagonists in an assault on the “established ideas of excellence in art from a consciousness formed within the habitat of a rural periphery, by positioning their bodies and lives as the crux of art making” (Weerasinghe, 2005: 183).  They challenged every aspect of art-making – the role of artists, the art methodologies and even the episteme of the field – which created a space for installation, performance, object art, collage and other variations of art-making to germinate and blossom. In this new creative space, artists were able to draw attention to - without shame and inhibitions - their personal experiences, identity crises, anxieties, sexual politics, and private fantasies. Their art discussed social/political issues at a personal level. These multiple manifestations could be defined as representative of the 90s Trend; and within the 90s trend, the artist’s persona was transformed from the reclusive, spiritually based, sedate, non committal, temperamental genius to that of an anxiety ridden, restless, critical, and confrontational risk taker. What is represented by the 90s Trend is the third epistemic break in recent Sri Lankan art. The early women artists (beginning and mid 20th century) discussed in this paper were influenced by the first two epistemic breaks.

Education and social context of early women artists

In comparison to most countries in Asia, Sri Lankan women had a head start with regard to education, under the British. It is relevant to briefly trace the evolution of the British education system in fashioning the consciousness and social practices of middle class and bourgeois women. The first school for girls was founded in the early 19th century by the then British Governor’s wife, Lady Brownrigg. While Sri Lanka inherited the British school model as part of the civilizing package of the rulers, the main responsibility for general education was borne by Christian missionaries from the mid 19th century onwards. They opened up local language schools referred to as ‘vernacular schools’ for the poor and English language schools for the privileged. The underlying purpose of girls’ schools was mainly to produce good Christian wives for the male converts.  In 1833, after the Colebrook-Cameron Report on constitutional and administrative reforms, the colonial rulers’ involvement in the education sector resulted in establishing five girls’ schools staffed by British women. The majority who attended these schools were Europeans, Burghers³  and children from rich Sinhala and Tamil families. The emphasis of the curriculum in these schools was on the acquisition of accomplishments. The subjects included were English, British history, arithmetic, geography, ornamental needlework, drawing, music and western cookery. With the influence of the girls’ high school movement in Britain and subsequent introduction of Cambridge examinations to the country, some room for secondary education in Sri Lanka was established. Educational opportunities for women expanded in this early 20th century context. The curriculum was borrowed wholesale from the British education system and many teachers and textbooks were imported from Britain. While the curriculum was made the same for boys’ and girls’ schools except for a few variations, the value of such equality was debated spiritedly at the time where many colonial bureaucrats and influential women thought that limited education for women was adequate (Jayawardena 1986:118-120). This sentiment was captured well in what was expressed by Hilda Pieris, wife of a distinguished local civil servant in 1912:

A good deal more might be done by devoting the time which is wasted in obtaining a valueless smattering of Latin, French, theory of music and trigonometry, to …..music, drawing, dressmaking and fine needlework, subjects which will not only add to the charm of a girl’s home life, but will also lead to a considerable saving in the household expenditure (Denham 1912: 426).

As interesting as it is to observe the reasons for the resistance to this sense of equality in education, it is also worth looking at what was actually taught in schools:

…botany lessons were about English plants and flowers; domestic science instructions was from Kelly’s Advanced Text book of Domestic Economy, and the cookery taught was Western. The only difference between the education of boys and girls was that certain ‘accomplishments’ such as domestic science and needlework were provided for the girls…. (Jayawardena 1986: 120).

If the missionary education establishment professed producing good and accomplished Christian wives for their converts, the Buddhist Theosophist Movement, which presented the next major influence in women’s education, provided a platform to encourage good and accomplished Buddhist wives to the newly emerging bourgeoisie Buddhist men with a growing ‘national consciousness’. The stimuli for this Buddhist educational movement was given by high profile theosophist figures such as Colonel Henry Olcott, Helena Blavatsky and Annie Besant who were free thinkers denouncing Christianity and promoting ideals of Buddhist education and national revival. Their visitations and involvements with the newly emerging local bourgeoisie and vocal supporters of the national revival during this time led to the opening of many girls schools such as Museus College, Girls’ Buddhist School, Visakha Vidyalaya, Ananda Balika Vidyalaya, Maha Maya Balika Vidyalaya (Kandy), Sri Sumangala Vidyalaya (Panadura) and Sujata Balika Vidyalaya (Matara). 
As a result of this enthusiasm in women’s education and the opening of schools for them, opportunities emerged for women from elite and affluent segments of society to become ‘accomplished’ by the harmless pursuit of an educational pastime that would nurture their finer sensibilities and demeanor to be in tune with colonial expectations of finesse and good taste. If cooking and sewing were mundane domestic tasks that women traditionally did, by introducing and teaching subjects such as domestic science or home science, western cookery, ornamental needle work and drawing, they were transformed into a science and a disciplined form of study. As a result, the ones who studied these subjects were considered ‘accomplished’. This ploy to make women better cooks, better home decorators and better companions - a safe (pre)-occupation within the home and a harmless bit of empowerment – had the ulterior motive of discouraging them from venturing into a more public and active life, a role that would challenge the existing norms and hierarchies and add another level of anxiety to the already changing society (Jayawardena 1986).
The purpose of women’s education and a woman’s role in society were diversely interpreted by different segments of society, and women artists themselves internalized these in constructing their agency as artists. Significantly, the early 20th century education and socialization that modeled women artists’ persona, selectively appropriated Victorian values and codes of morality in forming a new Sinhala Buddhist (or the Sinahala Christian) ideal and demeanor for women. The women artists’ role during the early and mid 20th century basically floated within the gravitations of these social expectations and perceptions. Whatever expectations and limitations were built into women’s education during this period, it also opened up possibilities for women to access a basic art training and methodical learning of decorative arts and acquiring artistic skills. This also allowed women to become art teachers and art practitioners.  This meant that such vocations had to be negotiated within a public discourse while simultaneously balancing their multiple roles and agency as wives, mothers and artists on their own peculiar ways. While providing the space, art demarcated its purpose as a leisure occupation, a useful part of homemaking and to keep women within a domesticated situation.
The ensuing discussion drawn from the scarce available resources attempts to illustrate what preoccupied several of these women artists, how they negotiated their realities and their positioning within the mainstream art practice and the reception of their art. Too little is known or documented of these artists to attempt a more nuanced reading of their art practice and this absence itself marks the positioning of these artists within the art practice of this particular period.
 
Early women artists

Maisie de Silva, an artist born in 1907, navigated her artistic life through the two schools of thought promulgated by the two earlier epistemic breaks that occurred in the recent history of Sri Lankan art referred to above. Her life is somewhat well documented through the narratives of her son in her retrospective exhibition catalogue⁴ . Reading about her life gives us a glimpse of the predicament of an upper middle-class woman who chose to be an artist in a social environment that was on the one hand elitist and enveloped in colonial habits and Victorian morality, and on the other, in a political environment of nationalist struggle spearheaded by a motley coalition of traditional elite, southern new rich and estate owners who professed a limited liberality for womanhood through ideas such as adult franchise that included voting rights for women and establishing the system of education described above.

Maisie de Silva initially attended the Buddhist Girls School (later named Visaka Vidyalaya) when it was first established in 1917 by the Sinhala Buddhist philanthropist Mrs. Jeremias Dias of Panadura and later the Ladies College, a school, established by Christian Missionaries. She passed her University of Cambridge Junior School Certificate examination in December 1922 where she gained a distinction for drawing. Her early art training was received in the private art classes given by Florence Mason from the Slade School, UK while she also attended the Amarasekera School of Art established by the well known atelier, A. C. G. S. Amerasekera. During school years she competed in and won acclaims in a number of art competitions organized by the Ceylon Society of Arts⁵  and exhibited alongside leading students of art such as J. D. A. Perera who later became a famous art personality. Maisie de Silva pursued her art training seriously and methodically and became a versatile and innovative portrait painter. At the age of 23, she married M. W. M de Silva, a medical practitioner. Her son Rajpal de Silva reminiscences his mother telling him that she “did not touch a paint brush for almost ten years after marriage” (de Silva 2000: 11). She resumed her art practice again in the early 1940s. 
De Silva’s own perception of her role as an artist is well summarized in her comments to the questions posed in a radio interview conducted by Jag Mohan, an art critic and journalist from India on 2nd September, 1949. Selected excerpts from the interview are reproduced here:

Jag Mohan: ….Why do you prefer portraits to landscapes and still life studies?

Maisie de Silva:  It never occurred to me that I preferred portraits to landscapes and still-life studies. Stuck at home, I can only do portraits easily. Of course, when I go on holidays I try to make use of the opportunities for painting from nature….

Jag Mohan:  Still, you are essentially a portraitist. Is it because you get plenty of commissions?

Maisie de Silva:  No. I don’t think in this country you get commissions often. I haven’t made it a profession as yet. Being a woman, I remain in the background and allow other portraitists, especially men, to get orders. So far I have been commissioned only three times – by the former French Counsel’s wife Madame Jobey, by Sir John Kotelawela and very recently once again by him…to do a portrait of his mother. ….

Jag Mohan:  Whom do you prefer, men or women (as sitters)?

Maisie de Silva:  I have never thought men are different from women as far as a portraitist is concerned. I have found it easier to approach women than men for being my sitters. For instance, my three daughters were easily available for me. Of course I would like to paint more men…

Jag Mohan: …Have you found a conflict of interest between your domestic duties and the responsibilities of an artist?

Maisie de Silva:  I have never found a conflict.  My family came first and foremost. I have never felt that I have sacrificed anything. I believe that a woman’s place is in the home but if the person happens to be talented and an artist as well, painting or sculpture or whatever it is, must be only a hobby. I for myself usually kept away from high society life as much as possible to devote my time and energy to painting (Maisie de Silva,1907-1997: Portrait of an Artist [exhibition catalogue]).
 

Her fairly extensive output of work from the post 1940s period informs us of her prolificacy in portraiture. Predominantly working in oil on canvas, her sitters were mostly people whom she knew personally and met during her travels and her social life, and many of them were family members. She was a frequent participant in regularly organized exhibitions of the Ceylon Society of Art. Critics have commented on her work as exceptional among the rest of the exhibits in some instances⁶,  and the evolution of her art practice has been traced and commented on publicly. However, what is interesting to note is that while the public had accepted her as an accomplished artist, Maisie de Silva herself publicly declaimed this position and clearly identified herself as a hobby artist. What is even more interesting is that while she proclaimed herself a hobby artist, she constantly engaged in the pursuit of public acknowledgement and public display of her work by continuously exhibiting in Ceylon Society of Art exhibitions along with other well known artists such as A. C. G. S. Amerasekera, Donald Ramanayake, Stanly Abeysinghe etc. As such, her work was publicly accepted and entered into a public discourse as serious art. 
One can assume that this fluctuation in locating and defining their work between public and private domains was a reality for many women artists at the time. The habitual use of this split personality was a device they used to retain their artist’s agency without drawing too much attention to their transgression into a sphere that was assigned to the male. By claiming to be a hobby artist Maisie de Silva located her artist self and her art outside the usual behavioral norms of the art world such as competitiveness, universalism and bohemianism. Her work expressed a world that is familiar to her and had proximity to her own experiences. Her subject matter consisted of her friends, her children and their friends, people whom she met in her travels and in her life as a medical practitioner’s wife stationed in different locations of the country. This was the case with many other women artists as well. Their art did not overtly claim universality in their thematics which uniquely differs to the way male artists approached their expressiveness in art. This particularity in handling the subject matter continues to be seen even among many contemporary women artists although there is a vast difference in the context and the ideology of art-making, then and now. 
There have been a number of women artists who have been active since the mid 20th century, whose work have been in the public art discourse. If Maisie de Silva belonged to the school of art that obtrude an academic realism supported by the Ceylon Society of Art, many of the artists in the mid 20th century were deeply influenced by the 43 group, and a number of women artists exhibited along with them in various exhibitions. A majority of them have had formal art training and have worked consistently while some have abruptly stopped their public involvement somewhere along the line, and pursued very private lives for various reasons.
  Sita Kulasekera received her art education from the Government College of Fine Arts in Madras.  After returning from India she engaged in teaching art for a while. Her work, influenced by Expressionist art captured the subject matter in an extremely delicate mood. Most of her work was successful in portraying people (perhaps close to her) not as static portraits but with life. This sensitive and almost tender aspect of handling the subject matter can be seen in Maisy de Silva’s work too. Sita Kulasekera was active during 1950 and early 1960s, and exhibited with the 43 Group a number of times including in the exhibition held at the Imperial Institute in London in 1952. She married the well-known artist and 43 Group member Richard Gabriel. Sita Kulasekera exhibited with other members of the 43 Group such as L. T. P. Manjusri and Richard Gabriel in studio exhibitions between 1962 and 1964. However, at a later stage, her public involvement in art diminished due to personal reasons. The last known instance of her work shown publicly was at the Reclaiming Histories: A Retrospective Exhibition of Women’s Art held in 2000.
Sushila Wijesuriya, a contemporary of Sita Kulasekera, was a graduate of St. Martins School of Art, London. Like Sita Kulasekera, she too exhibited a number of times with the 43 Group. Looking at her relatively small collection of art that was in the public domain, one could see the close affinity her work had with the works and internal dynamics of Justin Daraniaygala.  She seemed to share with him the tendency to portray the complexity of personal dramas in life in her work through a visual language that is expressionistic and cubist. Sushila Wijesuriya withdrew from the public exhibition circuit early in her artistic career due to reasons of her own.
Swanee Jayawardena and Sybil Keyt were also active at this time. Swanee Jaywardene had her initial art training from the well-known art teacher, Cora Abrahams at the Melbourne Art School in Colombo and later studied drawing and painting under the artist Harry Pieris who was an active member of the 43 Group. During her long art career she also experimented with textile dying and engaged in innovative designing using ‘tie and die’, a batik dying technique. She became known for her design concept in batik called ‘batik explosions’ and was instrumental in introducing batik as an art medium to the school curriculum at the Bishop’s College where she taught from 1947 to 1967. Sybil Keyt too had her initial art training at the Melbourne Art School and matured as an artist within the art environment of the 43 Group. She was invited to exhibit with the 43 Group in 1956 and was included in the group of artists who showed their work in the exhibition Ceylon: A Painter’s Country held in London in 1960s and the Asian Artists Exhibition held in Tokyo in 1958. In 1957, a number of young artists organized themselves into a group called the ‘Young Artists Group’ where Sybil Keyt was a founding member and she exhibited regularly with the group.   
Saraswathi Rockwood is described and remembered by some of her contemporaries as a very strong artistic personality with her own particular blend of stylistic variations in her art practice. She had her first exhibition in 1951. Extremely versatile in the technique of pastel and oil, her work repertoire includes painting, sculpting and ceramic painting.  Best known for her portraits in pastels and oils, she has been a prolific artist throughout her life.  She was perceived as an independent artist in whose work one could trace the influence from many sources. Some of her works have traces of stoic draftsmanship of academic realism and others put forth an anxiety and overwhelming desire to free from such overtly disciplined nuances. She has also engaged as a cartoonist contributing some very defiant political satire to the public through newspapers. Outspoken and bold in her expression, her collection of work reflects the restless, independent and eclectic nature of her persona. One of the most senior artists living in Sri Lanka at present, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, Sri Lanka awarded her the title ‘Kalapathi’ in 1987 in recognition of her long artist career.
Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake was first trained as an educationist but took to painting later and is mostly self-taught.  Her first exhibition was held in 1966 at the British Council Library in Kandy while she was still pursuing her postgraduate studies in education.  Since then, Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake has been actively exhibiting and has maintained a considerable art output. One of the consistent themes that she has explored in her work is the representation of the mother and child. Her work on this theme is reminiscent of the writings of the 19 century writer Johannes J. Bachofen whose writings were assumed to have been familiar to the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker who too did many works on a similar theme. The following words from Bachofen in many ways seem to place in context the work and the thematic preoccupation of Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake:   “The relationship which stands at the origin of all culture, of every noble aspect of existence, is that between mother and child…Women at this stage is [sic] the repository of all culture, of all benevolence, of all devotion, of all concern for the living and grief for the dead” (Bachofen 1967:79). When one looks at Chandra Malalgoda Bandaranayake’s overall thematic preoccupation, the majority of her works tend to capture women’s activities and experiences.
In comparison to painting, there have only been a handful of women artists who have taken to sculpture. The best known among them are Leela Pieris, Sita Joseph De Saram and Malathi de Silva. Leela Pieris was born in 1939 and attended Cora Abraham’s Melbourne Art School and then went on to study sculpture at the Camberwell School of Art, UK.  Her particular interest in bronze casting made her study the subject at Camberwell and then at the Art Bronzes Chelsea, an establishment in London well-known for its casting of bronzes. Upon her return to Sri Lanka in 1960, she undertook many sculpture commissions. She did a number of life size figures of Christ for some local churches, and the largest work she undertook was Christ on the Cross, a statue of 12.6 feet for the Basilica at Tewatte, Ragama in 1978 (Reclaiming Histories  2000: 16).
Sita de Saram received her art education at the Ceylon Technical College (later known as Haywood and then as Institute of Aesthetic Studies and now as the University of Visual and Performing Arts) under the guidance of the renowned artist and teacher J. D. A. Perera.  A fine portraitist and a skilled sculptor, she is known for the classical approach to her work. During her career she has executed many portraits of well-known personalities. Malathi de Silva first learned sculpture under E.M.J.S. Fernando, a teacher and sculptor at the age of 19 and then went onto study at the Charles University, Prague. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies there and apprenticed under the renowned British sculptor Lynn Chadwick in his foundry and at Poplar College, East London, UK before returning Sri Lanka. She did collaborative work with the British poet Jane Russell where both artists tried to find a synthesis between poetry and sculpture through form. She together with Jane Russell attempted to revive a dying tradition of bronze casting in the area of Kadugannawa in 1987 (Reclaiming Histories  2000: 4 -5). 
Barbara Sansoni, Ena de Silva and Chandra Thenuwara are three artists who made themselves reputations as designers in textiles.  An excellent colorist and artist, Barbara Sansoni through her enterprise ‘Barefoot’ managed to revive and popularize the use of hand woven textile within the urban elite and middle classes.  Her textiles and hand woven panels or constructions have been exhibited in various art and textile exhibitions in Sri Lanka and abroad. Barbara Sansoni is also an excellent artist of pen and ink drawings of historic architecture. Ena de Silva was well known for her innovative batik designs. She and Barbara Sansoni worked with the eminent Sri Lankan architect Geoffry Bawa on interiors of some of his well known architectural projects.  Chandra Thenuwara received her initial art education under Cora Abraham and her passion for color and fabric led her to experiment with hand woven fabrics.  She joined the Department of Small Industries and has worked there for 2 decades creating a wide range of designs and varied and unusual color combinations for hand woven fabrics. Her designs helped create a great demand for  handloom saries produced by the workshops of the Department of Small Industries popularizing locally produced woven textiles.   Chandra Thenuwara who is a fellowship member of the Textile Institute of UK also teaches at the University of Moratuwa.
Women artists have also been leading figures in art education. Cora Abraham and Latifa Ismail have been two of the main figures in the alternative art education that was available for art students apart from the government sponsored art school, Institute of Aesthetic Studies. Cora Abraham was the founding member of the Melbourne Art School that provided an art education to most of the early artists of the mid 20th century.  Latifa Ismail continued this private art education in the later part of the 20th century, providing art training for young children as well as to more mature individuals.  Noeline Fernando who belongs to the generation of artists that became active in the 1970s and still continues to practice has also been an influential teacher for very young children. She continues to practice as an artist and also conduct regular classes at the Sapumal Foundation, an art foundation that holds the largest single collection of 1940s art. She was also a student of Cora Abraham at the Melbourne Art School from where she acquired training in painting, batik and ceramics.  Sybil Wettasinghe uses her art to create a fantasy world for children. An excellent illustrator of children’s books and a vivid storyteller, she created a distinctive style and characters through her storybooks. Largely a self-taught artist, she has written and illustrated over fifty books. Her book Umbrella Thief has won international acclaim and has been published in a number of countries.
The artists I have chosen to highlight in the preceding discussion are those I thought would represent the stylistic, methodological and ideological variations in the art practices that women chose to undertake, particularly during the early to mid 20th century, which defined the type of art that many women artists who came after them followed. As evidenced through the discussion above, these artists generally got the chance of exhibiting as part of groups, selected subject matter that was seemingly non-political and often when they ventured into new and experimental techniques or material, they preferred to remain within the domain of the feminine and often under-played the significance of their art practice. Almost all of them have remained outside the main Sri Lankan art historical discourse, with their art unacknowledged within art history as significantly important. This is largely due to the art history’s inadequacy and non- interest in grasping the socio-cultural contexts of art produced by women and the internal dynamics that govern their art-making process, rather than women artists’ inability to produce significant work.
Interesting parallels, comparisons and contrasts can be drawn with the contemporary groups of women artist that I discuss in the next section. Some similar strategies and aesthetics of art-making can be traced among many contemporary women artists as well.

Impact of 90s Trend on women’s art and contemporary women artists

As I have noted before, the 90s Trend can be defined as the 3rd epistemic break in the Sri Lanka art historical evolution. In the background of a society that was riddled with violence⁷ , the state institutional structures unsympathetic to individual and collective fears and anxieties, and unplanned and unruly economic development that brought in uncontrolled globalization with all its lures, opportunities and disappointments, the artists of the late 1980s and early 1990s were at the edge of an art discipline that failed to reconcile their lived realities, dilemmas, and their need to express. The artists who carried the burden of the 90s ideology were also a generation of artists that differed from the pre 1970s generation of artists in many ways.  The demography of the community of artists had changed largely from being from the Colombo based elite, affluent and upper and middle classes to the regional urban/rural, economically deprived and lower middle class. Distant from colonial memories, they were able to transcend two historical fretters: one that seeks a ‘particular Sri Lankaness’ as an emblematic identity that declares its ‘true’ national authenticity and the other which seeks a ‘self’ that is bound in a transcendental state of being; a ‘soul’ that should not be cluttered and influenced by the anxieties of one’s socio- political realities. Within this environment, the contemporary art scene has produced a very youthful artist community which has been able to sustain the dynamism and diversity in ideologies and methodologies of art-marking.
Other than backgrounding these socio-political factors, there were individual actors who made an impact through their intervention in a number of ways to initiate the change and also to sustain the momentum of the 90s trend. Through their individual roles at the Institute of Aesthetic Studies, Jagath Weerasinghe and Chandraguptha Thenuwara managed to influence a new generation of artists to think and work differently. Their ideas were informed by contemporary thinking that questioned notions of identity in the post colonial/neo-orientalist and post nationalist discourses and the new definitions of gendered relations and sexual politics as much as the international trends of new art practices. The Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts which both of these artists helped found as an alternative art school became the nodal point of subversion and congregation for many of the artists who represented the 90s trend. Artists’ visits to local and international workshops, participation in international art events, receiving international curatorial attention and opening of the Heritage Gallery, a new art space that was willing to accommodate the new trends in art, provided a supportive atmosphere. 
A number of exhibitions in the 1990s formed and defined key ideological premises and visually placed the aesthetics and methodologies of the new art trend. The 1992 exhibition Anxiety by Jagath Weerasinghe was a crucial point of departure. It marked the first instance where an artist conceptually formulated an exhibition that dealt with new modes of thinking.  It set the path for the future development in visual art. This exhibition had produced definitive consequences for artists who were restless and were yearning for change. The space created as such gave rise to other influential exhibitions such as Barrelism by Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Vehicle Named Woman by me, No Glory by Sarath Kumarasiri and Yanthra Gala and Round Pilgrimage by Jagath Weerasinghe. These exhibitions tendentiously articulated and further elaborated the kind of aesthetics and thematics that were to come in the future. The reaction and non-reaction to these exhibitions propelled the main proponents of the 90s art to draw a manifesto that outlined the ideological premises of the new trend. In 1999, the No Order Manifesto, largely written by Jagath Weerasinghe and myself with input from others, was released at an exhibition by the group. The others who were in the No Order Group were senior artists Chandraguptha Thenuwara, Kingsley Gunatilake, G.R. Constantine, Muhanned Carder and junior artists Pradeep Chandrasiri, Sarath Kumarasiri, Nilanthi Weerasekera and K. Pushpakumara.  The art thus established and artists liberated by the new ideology gave rise to an artistic personality “who was conscious of his or her intellectual and political powers and possibilities” (Weerasinghe 2005: 188) and who privileged her/his life experience within a socio-political and critical frame of mind. 
It is within this new role of the artist and the newly liberated space of artistic expression that contemporary women artists (of the 90s trend) emerged. The general tendency of the artists of this generation to hail from the lower and middle classes stands true for women artists as well. Among the broad diversity of work that deals with a range of complexities and ‘psychological dispositions,’ the most prevalent subject matter has been the investigation of the ‘self’. This self-interrogation was carried out in a number of spheres such as violence, identity, sexuality, urbanity etc. It is in this scenario that feminist ideological tendencies got currency and the cultural taboos and Victorian conventions on sex and sexuality, and women’s roles in society were re-assessed through women’s art (Weerasnghe 2005: 188). While some of the art practices of the early women artists discussed above are continued by some contemporary women artists, others have taken bold steps to re-define the space and role of the women artists at the level of both ideology and practice. What may have been relegated to a strictly domestic provenance in earlier times has now entered the public sphere as an artistic preoccupatiuon to bring out the political in the personal. 
Within women’s art, there are a number of strategies, aesthetic arrangements and thematics which artists have used in recent times. At the same time, one could see that a single artist has often dealt with more than one of these tendencies over a period of time. Therefore in my narrative on contemporary women artists, I would look at ‘women’s work’ under these different tendencies rather than discussing each artist. Through this arrangement, I hope that a fair sense of the eclectic nature of women’s art can be gained. These artists have been exposed to the global trends of art-making, received an education that does not limit itself to form and technique and found spaces and avenues in and through which they may express themselves as artists despite their origins from the not-so affluent classes. These then, are the figures that have presented their preoccupations of the ‘women’s burden’ as a subject matter acceptable within the ‘main issues of the country’ that my friend commented on. They are inspired by female role models such as Frida Kahlo. Information on their work and life has reached them through processes of globalization. Locally, several of them have been influenced by my own work. They are no longer defined by the conventions of social practice that restricted their predecessors. These then, are the artists who strive to subvert the stereotypes and to explore their life worlds to practice art in contemporary times, despite a set of restrictions and challenges faced by them that are similar in some ways to those faced by the earlier artists and are also different.

The feminine as a social construct

Many artists have explored the body of the woman as a mystified representation of male fantasy in their work. My 1997 exhibition Vehicle Named Woman was the earliest attempt at dealing with this particular theme. I made a concerted effort to interrogate the sexual politics and women’s subjectivity and lay bare the politics of female subjectivity and the possibilities of art as a form of theoretical investigation. Using automobiles or cars as a metaphorical tool, I investigated how the female body is viewed and used as a vessel, servicing society’s needs and how it secured its existence as an exotic, sexual and fetishised object by and large. My aesthetics, which incorporated car parts (car doors, tires and body parts) and welded metal, offered further possibilities for new trends for artists in terms of both method and material while drawing criticism from others for its jagged aesthetics that did not have affinity with art formalism from the past.  In addition, my works An Auspicious Moment and My Erotic Journey both critically intervened in the contexts of popular myths on women’s sexuality.  While the former looks at the politics of woman as a procreator, the latter hints at the issues when the reverse is explored in contrast to the conventional role of woman as the comfort giver or provider of pleasure and man as the voyeur. Within the same thematics, I also looked at the visual representations of women in the media focusing on popular print media and billboard advertisements in my other works⁸ . In 1997, another artist Nilanthi Weerasekera attempted an investigation of the ‘feminine as a social construct’. Nilanthi Weerasekera explains her series, Fabricated Woman that was initiated in 1997 which continued to 2000 in the following words:

I am Nilanthi from Hettimulla, Kegalle. As a kid, everybody called me Weerasekera’s daughter. And at school I was known as Sepa’s nangi (Sepa is my brother). And if by any chance I had started an affair, I would have been referred to as ‘so and so’s girl… (Weerasekera 1997 [Leaflet text of the exhibition Fabricated Woman]).

In her work she confronts the mediation of society in constructing the female subjectivity, which also objectifies the female image by sexualizing and eroticizing it   through a male-centric discourse for the pleasure of the male gaze.
While Nilanthi Weerasekera’s work directly confronts the issue of women’s subjectivity, Chamarie Thapaswarage, a younger artist who graduated from the Institute of Aesthetic Studies in 2003 proposes the construction of a ‘parallel universe’ in order to locate the female subjectivity in a liberated and more satisfactory context. Her works investigate isolation and aloofness from the outside world where she eternally searches for a suitable oasis for her lamenting self. Here, the artist’s strategy is to privilege the intensity of her struggle as a means of highlighting the misdeeds of society towards women:

…I feel and sense a clear difference between the ‘outside world’ and the world I refer to as ‘my world’.  My world is what I yearn for and it is where I try to find refuge. It is where my expectations and my sentiments have validity. I am aware of the capacity and capabilities that the outside world have to fulfill my physical comforts…my material needs. I am also aware of its incapability to recognize my desperate lonely inner being. Therefore, isolation overwhelms my internal and private world…the world of the woman called Chamari. Confrontations with the outside world leave me even more disconnected from what is going on around me. I am disconnecting myself from the outside world because I cannot digest the singular and one-sidedness of everything it represents.  My artworks refer again and again to my restlessness within this isolated inner world. They become the records of my inner struggle (Thapaswarage 2001).

Interrogation of female subjectivity through personal histories

Another tendency in contemporary art-making among women has been the interrogation of the self/identity/role -- the female subjectivity -- through a reworking of topographical elements from one’s own personal histories and experiences. My subsequent exhibitions and large installation works since the works referred to earlier (Dinner for Six⁹  and Comfort Zone¹⁰ ) have further probed the uncomfortable positioning of women in society specially focusing on middle class women. I distanced myself from the earlier theoretical orientation and reached for experiences and histories from my own life to work out the narratives. My work is also meant to reveal a specific annotated treatment of ‘material’ and ‘making’ where the material itself becomes part of the narrative of the work, and the process of making becomes part of the overall meaning. This is seen well in my works The Ancestral Curtain and Comfort zone. These works, which are a nostalgic and critical glance at the women in my family history, try to highlight the contradictions of women’s agency at work within the family and its traditions. Both works are done with crochet as the main raw material where art also becomes a project of elaborating the craft aspect of art-making where material and labor produce part of the overall meaning of the work.  This aspect of art-making has received a following where one could see a number of younger artists (male and female) treating material and labor similar to that of a craft tradition.  Another woman artist who invokes the craft aspect of art-making is Marie Gnanaraj who is a handloom textile artist and designer. Of the series of work published in the journal, ArtLab¹¹,  she describes her work as something that she lives and works with, where her history of life is recorded in thread:  “Every thread is very delicate; drawn too tight it will break. This reminds me of the fragility of one’s life, which can be lost in a minute. The works (that are included in ArtLab) are generally done as a felicitation to my family. The surfaces I have created in these work represent the likes and dislike of my children” (Gnanaraj 2004). 
Niranjala Gunasinghe’s woodprint series takes traditional female figures, motifs and patterns from temple paintings, somewhat reminiscent of the traditional block prints used in the ‘cotton saris’ printed in the 1950s and 1960s in Batticaloa (Eastern Province of Sri Lanka).  Her work takes as its theme the notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘contemporary,’ and questions where one begins and the other ends. In another series of works, she illustrates the woman within the protective, concerned and nurturing role, lamenting the predicament of children in today’s world with numerous abusive tendencies.
Padma Rajapaksha Wijekulathilaka’s art encapsulates her own life’s struggles and triumphs through the transformation of everyday used objects as material for her art. A broken ‘coconut scraper’ becomes a sculpture, an emotional marker for a situation experienced. It also becomes an object of defiance in some cases.  She works in a number of mediums and has been persistent in her theme that explores the concerns of women.  
The masquerading of female/male sexuality as a possible fetishised object for one’s voyeuristic and fantasy journeys has been a theme that has preoccupied some artists.  Danushka Amerasekera’s photographic work, Beach Series presents a reversal of the role of ‘voyeur’. Conventionally, within the art discourse, the holder of the gaze and the role of the voyeur has been the preserve of the male while the woman has been the object of fantasy.  By making the subject of her work the ‘male body’ represented in a vulnerable and sometimes purposely clichéd poses reminiscent of fashion photography, the artist/woman has claimed the ownership of the gaze, which was forbidden to her earlier by the prevalent cultural conditioning: “my photography is about the male nude in contemporary culture. The question arising from my work is that of perception or preconception coming from a cultural background that denies the nakedness of the male body” (Amarasekera, 2000).
Another artist working with photography, Manika van der Poorten looks at her own family history and reconstructs a memory book with a sense of nostalgia as well as a psychological play. Her series of works titled Last Doll and Dream Time unveils a psycho drama which is layered and carries many meanings. Her most recent series of work Boyz Own is a delicate photographic recording of adolescence through the eyes of an artist, a mother and a woman.  In this attempt, she looks at homo-social behavior where masculinities get formed and manifested in male children and the sensitive and often emotional realization of ‘sons growing up’. As van der Poorten observes, “not only are my sons constantly growing and going through profound changes but I also find myself changing in the way I relate/react to them and it’s a personally challenging journey in a way nothing else in my life has been. It’s a universal experience but also very personal.”¹²  (Perera 2008).

Women’s predicament in the face of social chaos

The woman in the role of survivor and tragic bearer of sorrow and burden of a pathological society has been a thematic concern for artists such as Vasuki Jeyasankar, Harsha Samarasinghe and Janani Cooray. Vasuki Jeyasankar, born in Jaffna but living and working in Batticaloa in Eastern Sri Lanka has been a proponent of women’s rights and human rights.  In this role, she is involved with Suriya, a women’s organization working in Batticaloa. Her art is largely related to her work undertaken in her capacity as an activist. Her work oscillates between the woman as victim – her body signifying a tragedy of a community -- and woman as survivor. Harsha Samarasekera has worked on a series where the dominant metaphor consists of  ‘boots’ interpreted as a symbol of political oppression and violence (boots in green) as well as the society as a victim (a fallen limp boot).  She accuses war and violence (ethnic violence in the north and youth unrest in south) as human folly and a pretext for other agendas of domination. Here she aligns her anxiety and protest with that of society.  Janani Cooray, whose overall work has strong feminist criticality¹³  on the objectification of female body, in her performance Pasting the Pieces¹⁴,  shifts her emphasis to woman’s subjectivity as a carrier of society’s burden, a mother-figure nursing the wounded to recovery. An interesting aspect of the performance also is the depiction of a ‘parallel reality’ in which the figure of the woman is located where she pastes colorful pieces of cloth on a charred body, oblivious to the rest of the world, like a demented woman one might sometimes comes across in a street corner. In this symbolic play of disconnection from the reality of a burnt city which offers burned bodies to mothers, her pasting the pieces signifies hope, survival and defiance.  It also poses the crucial question, who actually is mad – the society who churn out charred dead bodies or the ‘demented’ mothers who are trying to grapple with their sorrows and hold on to a continuously betrayed hope as a tactic of survival?  Referring to a review of Cooray’s performance by Darshan Ambalavanar, Sasanka Perera in an unpublished essay writes that Ambalavanar interprets her performance as an act of preparing the dead for burial which was seen as an act of love amidst the brutality of the violence (Perera 2006). Perera further notes that “while that was certainly one possible reading out of a number of possible interpretations, the other important interpretation metaphorically meant that she was putting color back on the body, and therefore putting life back where it has vanished from and attempting to bring back a way of life that once existed” (Perera: 2006).
Working on the theme of conflict and violence and highlighting the resultant destruction, Anoma Wijewarden’s large exhibition Paramita (Quest, 2006) pondered over and reflected upon the same pathological aspect of society while emphasizing the need to rethink the strategies and involvements that led to the existing destructive situation. The exhibition consisted of digital photographs, a video installation and a performance:
This exhibition is a sensitive endeavor that she has worked on for the last three years, to represent, through her eyes, what we have experienced as a nation. Harrowing though this reality is, what is noteworthy is that it is not devoid of hope, for we are offered a myriad of possibilities within the nuances of her rich tapestry of words and images to seek within ourselves the meaning of lasting peace, ways to transcend the rigid boundaries of ethnicity, religion and language, that bind us and imprison our minds and bodies and preclude us from attaining that reality (Silva 2006).
Here the artist engages in the role of a mediator in the process of ‘healing’. In both Anoma Wijewardena’s and Janani Cooray’s work one senses the subtle message of ‘hope’ running throughout. 
The investigation of women’s subjectivity in the predicament of social chaos and violence with racial overtones has also directed artists to look at one’s identity in terms of ethnic politics and questioned the composite ideas of ‘national’ categorizations. This is predominantly evident in the works of artists who are affected by the ethnic conflict in northern Sri Lanka and elsewhere in the country.  Most works of R. Vaidehi’s locates her lonely image at the center of her etchings in the background of a mass of buildings. Similar to an autobiography, the artist’s own self becomes the allegorical content referring to personal pain and collective anxiety of a community who has been made refugees and members of a scattered Diaspora. It is interlaced with a sense of desolation resulting from the dislocation from one’s own familiar place, the social plane and historical roots, as a result of which one has to repeatedly reposition one’s self. T. Shanathanan’s in his essay, Mapping the Location of Dislocation: A Reading on Post Traditional Art of Jaffna writes:

Vaidehi in her work questions the notion of identity in an ethnically polarized Sri Lankan society and attempts to see how the self identity is exchanged, devalued and handled by the agents of power through making a collage of various identity cards, police registrations and other documents  (Shanaathanan, forthcoming).

Sujeeva Kumari, in many of her paintings done in an expressionistic mode, situates a sole figure, and sometimes a head in the center of her frame and the ‘landscapes.’  These images are recurrent themes in some of her works. This same sense of isolation, which can be interpreted in terms of personal as well as social alienation, can be seen in the paintings of Nelun Harasgama which positions an elongated individual or a couple within a large room (or various confined situations). In the works of both these artists the mood makes references to the tensions of isolation or tensions of non-communicability which is transcribed into a lonely figure (or 2 figures) in an empty landscape. Their work falls into the category of ideas and art tendencies that investigates ‘self’ within the larger reality of society.  These investigations are also indicative of some autobiographical pictorial narratives which in the words of Weerasinghe are undertaken by “a character who is desolate and melancholy, yet sanguine or of a character who is struggling with some sort of bondage; captivity and a perplexity whose location and position are still being defined” (Weerasinghe 2005: 189).  
Artists such as Chandani Senerath Yapa, Sameera Mackan Marker and  Nelun Harasgama have engaged in an anthropological investigation of landscape and environment, treating elements and moods in contemporary landscapes and urban environments as visual culture shaping one’s perception and marking change through their work. Their landscapes find meaning and aesthetics in the contraptions and visual references of urbanization and industrialization.  Some of their works capture the charred and desolate landscapes and others give a scopic view of a distorted multiplicity of cityscapes.
A recent exhibition organized as an exercise of the final year students at the University of Visual and Performing Arts (UVPA) titled Installation: Miniature made me reflect on the art practices of recent female graduates.  In the exhibition I found that the majority of works by women students had a strong preoccupation with one’s own experiences while a number of them were based on the theme of love, marriage, children, not as a romantic ideal but as an implication of socio-cultural politics that reflects human vulnerability, need for belonging, power, domination and interpretations of sexuality. The titles given to some of these artworks were also quite illuminating: ‘Marriage Legalized’ (by Chandima Ranmuthugala), ‘This is Me’ (by Dayani Jayasinghe), ‘Reflections of Love’ (by Nayomi Tharanga) and “Bed…Growing’ (by Sharmila Piyadharshani Kumari.  All of these works referred to their own personal experiences and desires. An antecedent to the Installation: Miniature kind of art event can be traced to the Made in IAS, yet another exhibition of art by the final year students of the University of Visual and Performing Arts curated by Jagath Weerasinghe in 2001. This was also the first instance that the public was able to see in one place the diversity and intensity of thematics and art-making by the UVPA students. It was also here that one was able to first observe female students’ (referring to works by Chathuri Rajapakshe, Muditha Askin and Indrachapa Rajaguru) maturity in handling socially and culturally loaded subjects such as sexuality and marriage, and shed the inhibitions of drawing the frontal male nude. One could see a continuation of this critical engagement with the female experience in the backdrop of larger social issues in the works of artists   who have graduated from UPVA during the last 3-4 years such as Ulani Jayasena, R. G. Darshani Wathsala, Namali Priyadarshanie,  E. H. M Wijelatha, Lakisha Fernando, Krishanthi Sepalika, Inoka De Silva, Indralatha Dharmasena and  Lasanthi Kaluthanthrige. It is this ‘critical engagement’ with society and with oneself at a personal level that separates their kind of art-making from the artists in the earlier era who also worked within the same general thematic orientation centralizing their own immediate environment and experiences.  Contemporary women artists such as those mentioned above have opted to take possession of their agency by making conscious choices about their role as artists through an informed and thought out process unlike the artists of the earlier era who first assumed the role as an artist through the socialization process, the intention of which was to make an ‘accomplished wife’ out of a woman rather than a professional and critically engaged artist.

Toward a conclusion

Here then, is the female artist’s voice on various issues. Are they not the main issues of the country today? As seen through the above examples, female artists are practicing their art to express their views of the main issues of the country as experienced by them, within their life worlds. They are no longer compelled by a consciousness of a social reality that governs their choice of subject matter and method. Almost all the artists I have referred to above who are currently working in the Sri Lankan contemporary art scene have in one way or another been influenced or informed by the aesthetics and ideologies of the 90s art trend¹⁵.  They originate from rural, regional, lower and middle class families. These women are generally confronted by three dilemmas: 1) to break through the socio-cultural restrains that hinders them from taking risks, 2) to overcome their economic dependency on their families, as well as their families being dependent on them, and 3) to overcome the conservatism toward women to practice art in their own family environment. Therefore, their initial struggle has to be on a personal level in order to claim the rights for their self-representation as artists. This is different to the histories of women artists and their liberating attempts elsewhere¹⁶  in the world where women artists had to direct their struggles at the art institutional structures for equal representation and fair acknowledgement of women’s art than to deal with the issue of their ‘choice’ of becoming an artist and securing their self-expression.  If one looks at the number of art students who enter the UVPA every year, female representation has been notably much higher than the male over the past five years. 
However, when one looks at the number of female artists who continue to practice as artists after leaving the art school, the numbers are shockingly low. This situation demands a closer look at the personal circumstances of women artists and their personal struggles. Most women trained as artists end up taking up teaching, which is followed up by marriage and motherhood.  In this process of ‘settling down’ conventionally expected of women – mostly pressured by the families – the first casualty is their art practice. However, there are instances of defiance by some women (more than earlier) against this ‘settling down’ process.  The difficulty in resisting these social pressures stems from women artists’ inability in developing an external support structure that would help them to reckon with family and social pressures. This situation has left women artists at a clearly disadvantaged position.  One noticeable factor among male students as opposed to the females is that during university life they tend to develop their own networks with artists in other art fields such as theatre and music through participation in student politics and other group activities. This also becomes possible because the taboos governing their behavior are far less restrictive when compared to the codes of behavior that govern women.  Most male students get their ideological and political maturity within these networks and peer groups. It is also on the support of these groups that artists rely on to help them out during their early life as professional artists after graduation. Various ritualistic bonding behaviors particularly visible among male students seem to be lacking among the female student population due to the nature of their socialization process as women and other socio-cultural restrictions. This contributes to preventing women from forming their own networks, which would have supported them to continue their art practice away from home.  In addition, the closely-knit family environments and the ‘protective’ outlook toward women significantly prevent female art graduates from looking for imaginative alternatives to teaching and ‘settling down’ within marriage or even to continue work within their ‘settled down’ situation. These are some of the contemporary challenges and restrictions faced by female artists.
From the foregoing discussion the circumstances and politics that shaped the role of early women artists and how they organized their art practice to meet the tastes and expectations of their own social class while using it for self-expression of their artistic inquiries can be gleaned. The early women artists who mostly belong to the affluent and the middle class managed to secure their position as artists within the morality, gender biases, national and class aspirations of the time experienced by that segment of the society. The opportunities for their art education came through the intentions of the civilizational project of colonial rulers, the ideas on liberation for women through movements such as ‘women’s suffrage’, the Theosophical Movement and the modernizing tendencies of the independence movement in the early and mid 20th Century.  Within the opportunities given to them for enhancing their artistic sensibility to function as better home decorators and accomplished wives, they carved in a niche, sometimes transcending their private world to a more public one, establishing their identity and credibility as artists.  Their strategy was not to reformulate their role as mother and wife to accommodate their persona as artists, but more to synthesize the art practice within their existing gender roles and social expectations. In a situation where social norms, traditions and reprimands of social misbehaviors are serious methods to promote social conformity, one tendency of human behavior is to find means and methods to hide their radicalism within a subtle intervention and avoid loud confrontations. In a sense, the early women artists followed this tendency where they assumed split personalities, one as wives and other as artists, a role they publicly claimed as non professional even through their work within the public discourse was sometimes perceived as professional art.  What is interesting to note is that while they managed to claim a position as artists in the male world of art, their intervention and strategies did not really question the existing hierarchies or attitudes towards women or, initiate or contribute to a liberating ideology within the field of art.  Their attempt has to be understood as an initial struggle by woman to organize their art practices within the highly gendered and bourgeoisie art community and to survive as artists to continue their work.
The contemporary women artists whose social habits and economic circumstances are vastly different to the early women artists and  who deal with an art community that is informed by the current ideologies of art that accommodate feminist tendencies and experimental ideas, are faced with social dilemmas not much different to their predecessors. The difference is in their method of engagement to overcome these social dilemmas and the way the overall art scene is responding to such strategies. Not coming from backgrounds that placed ‘a high value on artistic enhancements as essential criteria for womanhood’ (an advantage that in most ways helped the earlier artists to access an art education first and then to expand their art practice to become artists), these young women had to make a conscious decision to become artists (or to get an art education) and venture into confronting the politics, hierarchies and gendered issues of the art field.   For these artists, taking such a decision was a process in which they had to negotiate with the pressures of economic and social expectations, and reservations toward art and its libertine practices that their families entertained. Their interventions in the art field are marked by the introduction of subject matter that deals with their most personal experiences with a feminist criticality and methodology that privileges the use of art material and practices typically assigned as feminine (such as lace, weaving etc).  Both aspects have helped to establish a feminist approach to art-making that has intruded into an art discourse that is largely male dominated. The most remarkable feature of contemporary women artists is their willingness to take risks in order to establish their art personalities within the artists’ community and their uninhabited actions of transcribing their anxieties and personal struggles into an artistic expression, thereby transcending the social and cultural stigmas that restrict woman’s expression.
Let me now try to conclude by drawing on the initial question thrown at me by my friend which I referred to at the outset of this essay. I would like to emphasize that contemporary women artists have been burdened with not having a historical lineage that professes an alternative to the conventional art discourse that might have allowed them to utilize their creative practices as an avenue for credible art creations together with their own criteria of greatness. As explained earlier in the essay, such exclusions and marginalizations are not only a matter of an art historical oversight but are also rooted in the socio-culturally and historically ingrained hierarchies and gender politics. Therefore, women artists invariably carry the responsibility of an attempt at liberation in the name of all women, first, to negotiate their right to speak and right to make a choice in their life and then, to be catalysts of change to rethink and reformulate art history’s construction of ‘woman’ and to confront its ingrained biases. Therefore, women artists have to negotiate their own artistic credibility and personality in the art community within this predicament, which in a sense constantly remind them that that they are not only ‘artists’ but also ‘women’ who are practicing as artists. This added tag bears the weight of all the lapses and exclusions practiced in relation to women’s art throughout the overall art historical discourse which artists who are women will necessarily have to carry. Therefore, my attempt has been to address to the best possible extent complexities and contradictions of contemporary women’s art  (specifically of 90s Trend) and the economies and workings that propel and limit contemporary women artists’ artistic energy in the context of limitations posed by a lack of in-depth research undertaken on Sri Lankan women artists. These artists do indeed carry the ‘women’s burden;’ not as a mantle under which they are confined, but as a vehicle through which they seek liberating self-expression.

1. Reclaiming Histories:  A Retrospective Exhibition of Women’s Art was held at the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo from 8th to 18th March 2000, and was curated by Anoli Perera.  The exhibition was organized by the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts and Women in Visual Arts (a women artists’ group that existed very briefly in 2000) and included the works of 40 women artists (past and present).  This was the first exhibition that documented women artists’ work in Sri Lanka. A small catalogue was released that included a brief written profile of all the artists who participated. The exhibition was partly sponsored by the Australian High Commission in Colombo.

 2. The artists who formed the 43 Group were Lionel Wendt, George Keyt, Ivan Pieris, Harry Pieris, Ranil Daraniyagala, George Classen, Richard Gabriel, L. T. P. Manjusri and Aubrey Collet.

 3. The mixed descendents from Europeans are commonly called Burghers.
 
 4. An exhibition ‘of Maisie de Silva’s artworks ‘ Maisie de Silva: A Retrospective Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings’  was organized from 20th  to 25th October 2000 at the Lionel Wendt Gallery, Colombo, Sri Lanka by her family.  The catalogue to the exhibition provides us quite a useful insight into the artist’s life and work.

  5.This was an influential art body in Sri Lanka during the early 20th century.

6.  In an article critiquing the Ceylon Society of Art exhibition in The Ceylon Observer of August 9, 1949, S.J. writes:  “What indeed is happening to the CSA? Who were responsible for the choice of pictures hung? Surely the standard of art is not so low? Certainly the excellent school children’s show recently proved that the younger generation has more artistic talent. How then can one explain this exhibition? There are of course exceptions – Mrs. M.W.M. de Silva, Donald Ramanayaka……..”   The same writer in another critique of the Ceylon Society of Art exhibition quoted in  Maisie de Silva, 1907-1997: A Portrait of an Artist (exhibition catalogue) makes the following observation“ ….The fifty-first annual exhibition of the CSA is not particularly exciting or inspiring. There are no ‘important’ pictures and the original and creative works are few…Mrs. M.W.M. de Silva’s two portrait studies show a mastery of technique, but not nearly as successful as some of her previous work, her portrait of Mrs. Gupta, for instance. She has however, developed a bolder style of painting which is effective.”

 7. From 1980s onwards, Sri Lankan society and politics has been burdened with the left oriented youth uprising from the south (1988 –91) spearhead by the Janata Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) that was brutally suppressed and a 30 year armed conflict with ethnicity as the central issue of rupture that has yet to be resolved satisfactorily.

 8. Goddesses Descending Series (2003), Pedestal for the Goddesses - Perfume Series (2005-6), Come with Me to My Heaven (2004) and Look at Me…I Am Divine (2004).

 9. Dinner for Six: Inside Out is an installation work by Anoli Perera undertaken during her residency at the Fukuoka Art Museum as part of the Fukuoka Asian Art Triennale held in 2001in Fukuoka, Japan.

 10. Comfort Zone was a component of the exhibition Sri Lankan Contemporary Art: Works of Ten Artists held at the Millesgarden, Lidingo, Sweden in 2004.

  11.ArtLab is a bi-annual journal published by the Theertha International Artists’ Collective. In Volume 1 (2004) of the journal, Marie Gnanaraj was featured in the ‘Gallery’ section.

  12.Excerpt from the author’s conversation with Menika van der Poorten on 22nd October 2008, Nawala, Sri Lanka.

  13 Janani Cooray’s performance Cage at the Theertha International Artists’ Workshop in 2003 referred to the problematics of the socialization process in relation to the girl-child. Her work enacted a ritual signifying ‘coming of age’ and what it means to young women.  She also works on theme of ‘feminine as a social construct’ critiquing the ideals pertaining to the universal image of ‘Beauty Queen’ which is closely associated with the image of ‘Barbie Doll’.

 14. Janani Cooray’s work Pasting the Pieces was performed at the exhibition Aham Puram held at the Public Library, Jaffna, Sri Lanka in September 2004.  It was organized in the background of the violent conflict between the LTTE, the Tamil insurgent group and Sinhala dominated Sri Lankan armed forces that has been fought for over 20 years in the North and North East. Jaffna is the capital of the Northern Province and has experienced significant human and material destruction as a result of war.

  15.There are also a number of other artists such as Amitha Indirani, Yamuna Munasinghe, Tamara Jayasuriya and Christine Ruth who have worked and continue to work within the trends and thematics I have identified earlier. 

  16.In the introductory essay titled ‘Fifteen Years of Feminist Action: From Practical Strategies to Strategic Practices’, Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock writes: ”--- in New York an Ad Hoc Committee of Women Artists was formed in 1970 to protest the meager 5 per cent of women exhibited in the annual survey held at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Demanding 50 percent representation for women, the campaigners picketed the museum, deploying Tampax and uncooked eggs in their demonstrations”  (Parker and Pollock 1987: 4).

Bibliography

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