• Catalog essay: Six  Degrees of Separation : Chaos, Congruence and Collaboration,  an exhibition held   from 4th to 19th September 2008 at Red Dot Gallery, Pita Kotte, Sri Lanka.

Sarath Kumarasiri

Background to Sarath Kumarasiri’s work has to be understood specifically in the context of human destruction, personal loss and youth anxieties of the 1980 -90s decade where the Sri Lankan political landscape was overwhelmed with violence, civil war and youth uprising.  His youth memories, overloaded with images of violence, death, mass graves, and reminiscences of disappearances of known and unknown others whose deaths are unacknowledged, has been worked into a visual expression through his terracotta, wood and bronze sculptures.  Memorializing the forgotten deaths of unknown youth and memorizing the loss of innocence of his own youth have been done and redone through his extensive series of works ‘ No Glory’.  Highly emotional and intensely humane, Kumarasiri’s body of work is at the same time a socio-political critique and personal narration and an archival endeavor to remember a period that the nation is constantly finding reasons of amnesia to forget:
“…I took the personal items such as clothes, shoes etc. as a symbol of the victims of oppression and recreated them in sculptural form.  By doing this, I consciously decided to exhibit them in a museum/ gallery situation where their memories could remain alive in my artwork and that memory could be shared by the public who view my work.
By doing these works, my intension was to bring ‘signs’ that refer to memories of innocent victims of violence into the gallery situation where their deaths are moaned respectably without stigmas, and their memories are not forgotten and trivialized. Also by doing this, I strived to bring symbolically, a certain greatness to those lost lives within the parameters of my art”- Sarath Kumarasiri.

-Anoli Perera-

• Concept of My Work by Sarath Kumarasiri

The years 1989 and 1990 marked an acute political crisis in Sri Lanka. Within this chaotic environment, freedom of life and expression was intensely violated where a large number of youth fell victim to organized political violence. Particularly individuals and youth groups opposing or contesting the political opinions of the state and its repressive actions became the targets of this violence. Many of my friends and relatives were among these victimized youth.

This phenomenon of violence and victimization manifested within us as an unbearably oppressive and anxious moment.  This was the background in which I started to do my first series of sculptures. In my sculptures, I tried to capture the pain the youth suffered through various acts of violence and the energy and anxiety of their struggle for survival.  I did a series of compositions taking the human torso as the sign of these youth and through these torsos I tried to narrate the pathological acts of violence directed by some members of the society towards others.  In these compositions I recreated the same marks of violence made by the state-sponsored vigilantes on the human bodies of their victims. I have also tried to use various art mediums in order to capture the graphic realities of these bodies of victims.

After these initial artworks, my perception of these political phenomena shifted to focus on other implications within the society.  I also tried to look at it from a different angle. My next series of sculptures became an attempt to commemorate my lost friends through the recreation of personal items they used such as their shoes, slippers, trousers and shirts, taking them as signs of remembrance.  These objects were sculpted in terracotta. The use of terracotta material, which gives a certain permanency to these objects, too became significant in the idea of ‘memory and commemoration’.

The concept of my third series of artworks was to take the personal objects of these young men and women sculpted in terracotta into a museum situation. The objective behind this idea was to make an intervention through bringing in mementos of the average citizen into an exclusive space such as a museum where memorializing usually is restricted to political and cultural elite of the country.  This was achieved to some degree by the exhibition ‘Crafty Thoughts’, held at the University of Liverpool Gallery where my work consisting of slippers and shoes made out of terracotta arranged within a glass case were exhibited among many other museum antiquities. 

I tried to enhance the expressiveness of the idea through the use of different material in making my artwork.  By the use of terracotta as the predominant art medium I hoped to capture and emphasize the essence of ‘rural and/or underprivileged youth’.  Terracotta is used within Sri Lanka as a popular raw material for making cookware and domestic utensils for daily usage by majority of the lower income families and rural population.