‘Drawn to Galle Fort’ exhibition this Saturday at Fort Printers, Galle Fort

Through 50 painted photographic images of Galle Fort and its surrounds, which are on show at The Fort Printers is a story of every community in the world – of assimilation and integration, of tradition and novelty, of commerce and ethics, of a community and the individual, of fate and destiny, of prophecies and quackeries, of usurping and sustaining, a living breathing Fort with over four years of fascinating history.

‘Drawn to Galle Fort’ the exhibition and the book covering both its locale and its surrounds is thus the painstaking, arduous and ultimately fulfilling result of an infusion producing and propagating a profusion of imagery by photographer and writer Juliet Coombe and it is a gift of lasting influence and eternal inspiration.

The images of Galle Fort and Southern Riviera are raw, seething and at times elegantly aloof and detached – in particular in its attention to detail found especially in the chipped yet sturdy tooth like indents in the temple tiers and also in the Tamil Hindu kovil’s weather-beaten fenestrations with their light blue and garish yellow smudged with black trails and patches – entrenched with a respectful sense of piety. The broken china fragments form a moonstone mosaic and a visceral eye piercing beauty only rivalled by Antoni Gaudi’s use of them in the public park.

While both the peacock and the soldier and also the rickshaw carriage at the Historical Mansion Museum along with their respective frames blend and camouflage themselves while the enigmatic arrangement of the ancient coins portend to an eerie testimony of commerce – what hands touched them and what blood washed its embalmed icons and personage.

These dynamic photographs with painted scenes on frames connecting the real with the unreal capture the fierce human determination and trepidation, with amazing imagery which run the gamut from the shattered coconuts used for rituals in the Buddhist temple thrown into a wicker basket, their denuded eyes and rich white flesh poking blankly at space in a squinty eyed, slack jawed meditation – all symbolising the violence of hope and good luck prayer.

The other extreme illustrated by the coconut plucker which focuses on an endearingly potent image of human valour and courage and fearlessness found nestled in the lassoed and trussed up feet of the toddy tapper whose wearied skin wrinkles and strains as he begins the assault on this testy vertical bark and in a touch of the slapstick the painting on the frame seems to have given him legs hairier than a werewolf notwithstanding the picture which is respectful of this most maligned and fatal of professions putting us the viewer in a state of newfound respect for this job, the tree – an almost bittersweet intoxication is achieved without any falsification or fake puerile sentimentality that seems to reek and emanate from many public domain visuals.

Each image in the exhibition taking on an unusual view of the iconic historic sites from the rooftop view of the Fort mosque’s upper storey and mainly the temple photograph shows a masterly almost painterly use of Renaissance subdued light – the temple wall shafting and caving into the monsoon water body below – building, trees and all – a serene séance that sucks you in as for a moment you hold your breath in utter wonderment. Finally the blue ocean and the bluer sky meld into one, forming a unity of the elements while in summation the humour is never lost as the proud leopard leers boorishly, head cocked with golden smouldering eyes brimming with pensive alertness and burning pride, seems momentarily unconcerned about the fact that his tail has scurried of and perched itself on the frame, sulking – a Heathcliff of the shrub savannah – grim and glum like a boggy moor. The overall theme is respect for the little ornate things from the ability of the craftsmen to human interactions.

‘Drawn to Galle Fort’ and The Southern Riviera is a pristine distillation of pathos and above all elevation, one that manages by dispelling all notions of cynicism and pessimism, to be a shocking parable in that all this newfound humanity is mired in an old world setting – it is time to discover ‘all the colours of the world’.