Traditional forms, techniques, and craft are rich inheritances that push forward the stories of familial legacies across generations in South Asia, in particular. Artist Anoli Perera sat down with us for ARTRA Magazine’s South Asian Contemporary Art Edition 68, to discuss the liberating essence of her textile practice, enriched by a home and childhood dominated by the presence of strong women with textile-based craft practices. In this interview, Anoli shares her insights about the blurry lines between art and craft, in reference to her textile-based artworks, as well as her observations on the shifting spaces within Sri Lanka’s art scene for contemporary female artists.  

Q | Looking back at your experience of becoming an artist in 1990s Sri Lanka, do you feel that Sri Lanka’s art scene has progressed? Not only from an industry standpoint but also regarding personal risk. In your opinion, is it still radical for a Sri Lankan woman to want to become an artist? 

Yes, I see a change, a positive one where many new women artists are engaging in very potent topics and doing innovative work. There are a number of performance artists who are doing strong work where they have captured international attention. There is a large number of women students at the University of Visual and Performing Arts. However, not many continue to practice after graduation as it is still challenging for women to sustain themselves as professional artists because social responsibilities remain the same as before for them. Even if institutional biases from galleries and barriers such as access to scholarships and funding may not restrict women artists, family pressures to be economically independent and marriage as well as social expectations can hamper their growth and sustainability as artists. Therefore, they have less chances of getting access to the opportunities presented within the artists’ community. 

Q | Tell us about how textiles are part of your heritage and maternal lineage.

I come from a middle-class family with its roots in the Southern coastal area of our country. My parents had a typical British colonial education and adopted numerous colonial practices and influences in their lives. My generation is perhaps the last generation that has some connection with the colonial past. I grew up in an environment where women trained in convents to learn homemaking ‘scientifically’. As such, women engaged with lacemaking, dress making and other needlepoint work which I was exposed to early in my life. This aspect influenced my work greatly later. I consider this a part of my personal heritage.

My early childhood was spent in a household dominated by the presence of women. I had 4 aunts and many grand-aunts from my maternal side, and needle-art was one of their major skills. The planning, designing, finding material and making the final works were done by these women in deep seriousness. Their engagement with dress-making and various home decoration attempts with needle-art, their collections of paraphernalia related to these processes presented another world to me during my childhood. As a kid, I thrived in the comforts of the domestic space they had created. As an adult and an artist revisiting these moments from my past gave me the initial impetus to revisit these manifestations of domesticity creatively and intellectually, and to draw from their disciplined execution of the art of needle point. 

Anoli Perera, 2022, Debris Collector Series VI

 Q | When did you decide to bring textiles into your practice?

I started experimenting with textiles in my art practice after I saw an exhibition with works from Louise Bourgeois’ series ‘Spiders’ in 1998 in Sweden during my travels at Malmö Konsthall. This really changed my approach to artmaking. After this experience, I started using cloth and textile extensively in my work. It was only after I shifted to textile that I fully understood the language and meanings embedded in this medium. As an artist, revisiting the moments from my childhood experience within the world of needlepoint that my aunts had created back then, gave me the energy and enthusiasm to draw from their disciplined artmaking in textile. It reconnected me with the oeuvre, metaphor and aesthetic practices of women who have been engaged in needle-art in the past generations of my own family. I felt liberated because of the depth and breadth it provided me in terms of cultural memory, meaning and metaphor, and because it connected me to a historical lineage which I could easily find affinity with.  

Q | Is your choice of material an avenue for you to explore gender narratives?

Many of my early artworks centered around the figure of the mother, motherhood, and her space within domesticity. One early series called ‘Comfort Zone and Comfort Bodies’ and another called, ‘Dinner for Six’, both talk about domesticity. My work ‘Second Skin’ is a large red dress woven with ½ inch elastic straps stitched into loops.  The elastic I used for this is commonly used for women’s underwear as well. The making aspect of the dress was craft-oriented, labor-intensive and repetitive. It was almost like lacemaking. The work’s themes center around the constant change the female body undergoes throughout her life in its cyclic preparation for procreation. It traces the contours of continuous changes in the body. The woven dress is presented as a second skin, stained red registering the change with each loop connecting from one to the other like a shroud of ‘being’. For me, this is a monument to change and its anxieties. 

Q | How do you define craft or craft-making in relation to the fine arts?

Craft and craft-making is seen as cultural heritage, and therefore something from the past not connected with the modern concept of fine arts. They are indigenous or traditional artmaking practices often with a functional aspect to it. Within the colonial period such local art practices were seen as inferior to fine art practices because of their repetitive making of the same object and unconventional material used. Craft was imbued with ritual, religious and functional purposes rather than for aesthetic appreciation and art for art’s sake. As such, local traditional art, textile weaving, needlepoint, and decorative art were seen as not refined and creative enough as ‘fine arts’ as defined by the British academic art historical traditions. But in the 1990s with the contemporizing of visual arts, boundaries of fine art changed to include craft practices within the artmaking processes – at least with regard to some important artists. Artists such as Pala Pothupitiye and I have used such craft-related practices in our artmaking.   

Q | What are your thoughts on craft and craft-making not being given proper recognition in Sri Lanka as an art form, and its recent rise in value? 

There have been attempts by many entities supported by the government and the private sector to give prominence and recognition to craft art practices. As a result, certain craft practices got an upliftment that encouraged artists to make more refined and innovative artworks. Success of the tourist industry too help in adding more value to the work because of the demand for traditional art works by foreign visitors.  

As an artist, I prefer not to use ‘craft’ but recognize it as local art which has its roots in our traditional art practices with different protocols of execution, promotion and valuation. The parameters within art shifts continuously, but with regard to cultural heritage and its dominant discourses, one always assumes it as static. Therefore, we deposit information about cultural heritage also as static even in our collective and individual memory. As such, our perceptions, ideas, practices get defined intuitionally within these repositories of memory. Since craft art is seen as cultural heritage, seeing change in the way the craft art is made or even for the craft artist to make innovation and change in their art becomes difficult. In terms of innovation and change, craft art is slow in responding which is unfortunate.

Q | Are there any aspects of craft-making that you feel should be spoken about more in the context of Sri Lankan art?

Recently moving back from Delhi and seeing the depth and breadth of their traditional art and the innovation one sees in them, I feel that our traditional arts need to evolve, to accommodate new ideas and be innovative in design.  I see everyone trying to do the same thing with little innovation.

Q | When being socially critical in your work, is public response a factor you consider?

I have never done a work thinking of the challenges it would face from the public or how negatively or positively it might be received.  I know that once I do a work and display it in public, my task is over as the creator, and it will be open for interpretation that can generate questions, critique or discussion This is similar to the idea of the ‘death of the author’ espoused first by Roland Barthes with regard to literature. As an artist, one of the best things I can do is take a risk making an artwork about an idea which I feel strongly about, irrespective of what the audience would think. Otherwise, one will never create change and always be in a safe zone generating the same kind of work. My art practice is shaped by my experiences and responses to socio-political and cultural contexts. 

Anoli Perera (b.1962) is a contemporary artist, writer and a co-founder of the Theertha International Artists Collective who is currently based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Hailed as a pioneering female artist in Sri Lanka, who ushered in a form of art informed by feminism and craft art practices, Anoli’s work engages critically on themes such as women’s issues, history, myth, identity, colonialism and post-colonial anxieties. Her works have been showcased in renowned art festivals and exhibitions, including the 4th Kochi Muziris Biennale, India (2018); Dhaka Art Summit, Bangladesh (2017) and Colomboscope, Sri Lanka (2019). Recent notable exhibitions include Notations on Time at Ishara Art Foundation, Dubai (2023), Visible/Invisible at Museum of Art and Photography, Bangalore (2023), and Visions of India at Monash Gallery of Art, Australia (2022). Her writings on contemporary Sri Lankan art have appeared in Art Asia Pacific, South Asia Journal for Culture, and Frontline, among others alongside authoring H. A. Karunaratne (2019), a seminal book documenting the Sri Lankan master artist. Anoli studied in Political Science, Economics and Sociology at the University of Colombo and later earned a Postgraduate Diploma in International Affairs from the Bandaranaike Center for International Studies, Sri Lanka. 

Written & Interviewed by Kavinu Cooray

Co-Edited by Pramodha Weerasekera