Lassanai (Beautiful)
Much of the work for Lassanai emanates from a 3-month stay (2015) in my homeland of Sri Lanka. Under the auspices of an Ontario Arts Council Grant I studied with two mentors who are masters in traditional fine art and craft that were culturally at risk. My intention was to study these old forms and revitalize them through a new context of contemporary re-interpretation.
Pattern is a strong leitmotif in this exhibition, delving beyond the purely ornamental. The “Atomizer Collection” a series of 10 works on paper re-interprets a hand grenade, an instrument of destruction as a vintage perfume atomizer, an object of beauty and scent. Each is decorated in a traditional or ancient floral motif, each title alluding to a piece of Sri Lanka’s history of colonization by the Portugese, Dutch, and British, and its resources that were in many cases exploited. Examples such as “Cinnamon Spice” references the ancient cinnamon trade, leading to a treaty where Sri Lanka had to pay 110,000 lbs. of cinnamon each year to Portugal; “Ivory White” referencing the slaughter of elephants for their ivory; “Blue Belle” the name given to the 400 carat Blue Sapphire found in a Ceylonese paddy field in 1926, and ending in the possession of a British Lord in 1937. Another, the misnamed 500 carat “Star of India” resides in the American Museum of Natural History.
The installation “26” envisions healing through beauty. It consists of 26 pairs of hand-painted “flip-flop” slippers, the footbed of each pair hand painted and inspired by traditional floral motifs. Slippers are ubiquitous and egalitarian, and through these designs there is a merging of the historic with the contemporary, as each pair memorializes one year of the recently ended 26 year Sri Lankan civil war (1983-2009). In their spare, elegant beauty they combine the spiritual with the plebeian, and mounted on a wall, arranged in a path, they symbolically suggest a step forward into a new era.
Read Artoronto’s Interview with Frances on her Exhibition http://www.artoronto.ca/?p=30534
Read the ROM’s South Asian Curator’s Blog on their purchase of my works.
http://www.rom.on.ca/en/blog/new-acquisition-frances-ferdinands
