Deliverance, an exhibition by Anoma Wijewardene

In an interview with her gallerist, Saskia Fernando, Anoma Wijewardene discusses her career as an artist and the concept behind her solo show, to open on 12 June at the Saskia Fernando Gallery and Paradise Road Galleries.

 

Wijewardene is an alumna of Central St. Martin’s College, University of the Arts, London where she received a first class Hons and also completed her MA. She has held solo exhibitions in Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Maldives, New Delhi and her country of birth, Sri Lanka.



SF: What led you towards becoming an artist?

AW: I have never wanted to be anything else but an artist since I was little. Apparently even as a baby I would trace the embroidery on the pillowslips with my fingers, so that may have been my very first act of drawing. Now I am drawing with my finger again, on the iPad!

Drawing is a compulsion and a habit that I cannot remember not having. Nothing really led me, it just kept popping out. If I am not being creative I almost feel I am not breathing correctly, I don’t feel fully alive.

 SF: For how long have you been a practicing artist?

AW: I have been practicing professionally from the age of 18. I sold work even during art college in London for over five years and my MA designs were the first work I ever sold to a fashion designer and it was photographed by David Bailey and was featured on the cover of Vogue. For about twenty years after I graduated I worked as a freelance designer, selling in Europe, the US and Japan while also being a visiting lecturer at several art colleges in the UK. While I was also selling paintings then it is only in the last 20 years that I have concentrated solely on my paintings and shown work at over 40 exhibitions in that time.

  SF: What are the main influences behind your work?

AW: Since I have been working for a very long time, influences have varied vastly throughout my life.

In my youth, the fact that my father painted and that I had very inspiring teachers focused my burgeoning interest. Poetry and literature, classical music, drama and film, as well as nature itself, were great influences in my teens and they continue to inform my work, even now, in a very pervasive and powerful way.

In my teens, I was influenced by the Renaissance, the Impressionists, the Expressionists and Pop Art, as well as Chinese and Mughal Art and design.

Much later, while living in London I had access to the opera, which I love; post modern, conceptual art, and various forms of multimedia art, sculpture and installations have influenced me. I love the work of Bill Viola, Elafur Eliasson, Andy Goldsworthy, Cindy Sherman and Cai Guoqiang.

Returning to live in Sri Lanka after 30 years in Europe my first shows in Kuala Lumpur, Colombo and Delhi explored our culture through our faiths Buddhism and Islam. Later, shows in Sydney and Colombo looked at mans relationship with the world, with himself, and his existential anxieties and concerns.

 More recently the works have questioned issues of war and peace, division and unity, and what is meant by reconciliation and harmony.

 SF: What is your message as an artist? Do you have a message to communicate?

AW: I am not sure I am interested in messages as much as I am in questions.

My art is my way of dealing with my own queries and anxieties and it is more an expression of my seeking and questing rather than anything to do with proclaiming messages. I don’t presume to have any answers to the great questions that trouble me, but I need to explore them visually as well as intellectually. If anything it is a complex and internal dialogue externalised and shared through the paintings or installations. If there is any message at all it may be it is that there are endless open-ended questions and many interpretations, and as many answers. The layers and complexities of life and living is what fascinates me.

 SF: What are the greatest challenges in being an artist?

AW: The challenge for me personally is to never allow myself to become comfortable in my oeuvre, either in the form of my inspiration, style or technique. To endlessly seek truth in all its forms and to tell it in a variety of ways. To forever push the boundaries, to break one’s own rules and expand one’s horizons, and never be satisfied. The challenge is to keep challenging oneself.

To accept that to create I have to be a solitary creature, simply because I personally cannot see or think deeply and meditatively, in a crowd. Sometimes that very aloneness which I desire creates separateness from society that I regret. One becomes the lone wolf and the outsider, even if one is longing to be part of society, and to fit in. Frankly, I struggle with that dilemma.

    SF: How has nature inspired ‘Deliverance’?

AW: I will quote from my article for ‘The India Habitat Centre Journal’, written in 2002 as it still holds good. ‘But even more vital, deeply nurturing and inspiring are the wild spaces I have visited. I am from a country of staggering natural beauty and diversity. I had a childhood spent in the water and sky, as well as the countryside. A single but unforgettable night in the Moroccan Sahara in mid-winter listening to a silence never heard before or since, riding across canyons in Kazakhstan with hunters and their golden eagles, swimming in the atolls with Pilot Whales and Manta Rays. These magical playgrounds inform my paintings in a way that cannot be identified, analysed or even dissected.’

SF:  How do you view your responsibility to the environment, as an artist, in this regard?

AW: The pure arts, as in art, music, poetry are unusual professions in that artists, composers and poets have no responsibilities to anyone or anything except to their own truth and integrity. It is an extraordinary freedom, and like all freedoms, has to be carefully tendered. The artist is the outsider in society and can express his own truths as he sees fit. So I don’t know about responsibility. It’s just more to do with what I am passionate about. As I outlined earlier, my paintings are the outward expression of my inner concerns and questions. Climate Change consumes my interest, because of my love for nature, and I simply cannot understand why so little is being done about it. So these are my questions taking the form of paintings.

SF: What views you are expressing on nature, the environment and the world in this exhibition?

AW: Simply that our beautiful and fragile planet is clearly hurting, we are indivisibly a part of it, it is us, not outside us. Can we put aside our greed for growth and slow down to her pace and her needs so that we your grandchildren, the flora and fauna, can all survive? The earth has been generous to us. Can we stop raping her and now give back to her?