- Chamila Gamage on his newest exhibition
This Friday (17) sees the Barefoot Gallery Colombo unveil its newest exhibition, Fabricated Society by Chamila Gamage. A visual artist with over 20 years of experience, Chamila’s work is rooted in painting, drawing, sculpting, and set design. He studied Painting and Sculpture at the University of Visual and Performing Arts, Colombo Sri Lanka (Bachelor of Fine Arts) and Master of Fine Arts at the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka.
For Chamila, drawing is one of our oldest forms of communication, and it can still be very relevant today. Through his work, Chamila attempts to investigate our collective memory and explore universal themes.
Interested in art from childhood, Chamila really got into art and realised the value of the subject when he was doing his Advanced Levels (A/Ls), and after completing his exams, he enrolled at the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Art in 2000, before going on to enter the University of Visual and Performing Arts, completing his arts education while working as a set designer at the Sri Lanka Rupavahini Corporation. Over his 20 years as an artist, Chamila has collaborated with groups of artists and done solo as well as group exhibitions.
“I wanted to be an artist because, through art, I can express my emotions,” Chamila shared with Brunch, adding that he lost his mother when he was three years old, and art helped him process his feelings: “I know that I can express my life emotions powerfully through visual art.”
Giving us some insight into his newest exhibition Fabricated Society, Chamila explained that the exhibition is inspired by Sri Lanka’s cultural diversity. As an art director, Chamila found himself fascinated with and inspired by the diversity of cultures within our island nation. “From Jaffna to Hatton to the South, diversity is a beautiful, huge part of our social values,” he shared, adding: “I studied it a bit, and within that diversity is several individual identities in costumes, cultures, traditions, and the exhibition captures the diversity of these values.”
The pandemic gave Chamila more time to be able to properly analyse the subject, and also gave him the chance to collaborate with his family on the exhibitions, because everyone was home. “The term ‘fabricated’ in the name Fabricated Society refers in part to the media I have used for the exhibition,” Chamila explained, adding: “Because the exhibition is made up of experiments I have done with batik. As an artist, I always like to work with new media and expand my boundaries.”
Having found an excellent batik teacher, the artisan Upachanda Thilakawardhana, who worked with the late Mangala Samaraweera, Chamila played with Indonesian wax techniques, African tie-dye, and heavy linen to create the fabric that would eventually cover his canvas.
Keen to do the subject justice, Chamila spent over a year working on the concept and researching, visiting different places around Sri Lanka and studying elements of the lives of different communities and then a further eight months working on the batik and testing out techniques, moving away from traditional batik techniques, and instead approaching the process from scratch to create something unique.
“We can’t categorise art with terms like paintings, sculpture, performance art, and so on anymore. Those are traditional definitions,” Chamila said, adding: “We are living in a new age, where we can travel the globe and be seen on the internet. With these new methods for displaying art, I try to put out work constantly; to throw images into the great river of information; to cross borders and cultures and search for common threads and understandings.”
Fabricated Society by Chamila Gamage will be on exhibition at the Barefoot Gallery Colombo from Friday, 17 December to Sunday, 16 January.
