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| Sunday, 1 September 2002 |
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Lanka the garden of Eden - Fiona Hall by Chitra Weerasinghe
The only thing Fiona Hall, one of South Australia's most celebrated artists wanted to do with her "life was to subject it to all that was art." Something she has been fortunate to be doing successfully, giving way as she does to her fantasies, her interests, her grouses and her philosophy on issues that interest or baffle her; be they politics, the environment, health or wealth. And that via various media - photography, painting, sculpture and landscape architecture. "Don't ask me why I do what I do. I am difficult to define," she said, prefacing her interview with me at the Lunuganga Trust Office in Kollupitiya, on a sultry afternoon. And within minutes of that interview, it was obvious she was different in her thinking and in her work.
Not being confined to a regular schedule of work since she quit teaching art at an Australian university after obtaining a painting diploma from Sydney's National Art School and an MA in Fine Arts from Rochester's Visual Studies Workshop; and thereafter working in America, Hall travels from country to country exhibiting her work. She came here last month for an exhibition of her work in connection with the cultural exchange program of leading artists between Australia and Sri Lanka, through exhibitions and other collaborations - presented by the Australian High Commission in association with the Lunuganga Trust. That exhibition titled 'Leaf Litter' drawn from her ongoing work at Lunuganga was at the Paradise Road Gallery and is somewhat different to what we generally see here. The colonising powers like Britain took plants from one part of the world to another for agricultural purposes and it was Britain that eventually became prosperous, remarked Hall. And so this work of hers, the major part of which deals with post colonial issues, comprises and brings together botanical classifications and the money market. "One from the natural world," as she calls it, and the other from the "world of capitalism." And the way she has done that is interesting. She has collected bank notes from countries that have been colonized and then "with as much accuracy as possible" painted leaves that are characteristic of those countries. For instance there is tea which originated in China and rubber from Brazil. There is a kris leaf painted on a Philippine one peso note; a tumeric leaf on an Indian two rupee note and a bittergourd leaf on an Indian five rupee note, to mention some.
Through this kind of classification, Hall believes we could see and analyze a contemporary world. And she never failed to mention that although she comes from Australia, a wealthy first world country, her "sensitivity as an Australian artist is very non European." We are also a country colonized by Britain and although the issues specific to Australia are different to those of Sri Lanka, yet the very fact that our countries have a history of colonization, mark us as being similar. "Disconnected yet how connected we are!" she exclaims. She views problems such as the destruction of the environment and the marginalisation of the livelihoods of many of the world's people as having stemmed from those "historical offenses of the past few centuries. The new catch word 'globalisation' is the latest permutation of the push of capitalism at the expense of the environment and people's lives and many of the once most plant resource countries are now amongst the poorest on earth," she says. Elaborating on that aspect,she talked of many plant species having played a crucial role in the history of colonization, the growth of European power and wealth over the past 500 years. "Plants along with people have been shifted across oceans. Battles have been waged over them; and forests razed. Today we are paying heavily for over-taxing the environment and for that ever widening gap between the rich and poor nations," she said with a voice that reflected sadness. When Hall came here for the first time in 1999 as an inaugural live-in guest of the Lunuganga Trust; and with financial assistance from Asialink, the organisation that fosters this cultural exchange between our two countries, she enjoyed her stay at this garden estate of architect Geoffrey Bawa whose vision of a tropical garden idyll he nurtured for 40 years. This garden estate afforded her the ideal venue for contemplation, meditation, for living in, for working, for pleasure and for serendipity as had been Bawa's intention and whom she met in Brisbane in 1996. It is in this garden surrounded by lush tropical vegetation that 'Leaf Litter' emerged in its current form, says Hall. "This garden was conceived at a time when the world seemed stable; almost anything one needed to do seemed possible. And the time was there to do it." Hall has been coming here five times since her Lunuganga residence experience for she finds Lanka to be a "very productive place and more particularly because of her intense and abiding interest in the botanical world and in history. And her discovery too that there are many plant species that grow here and not in her own country. Her first exhibition here in 1999 was at the Barefoot Gallery and it was part of the work she had done in Australia for an exhibition. It was titled 'Paradise Terrestris' and for her exhibits at that show she used the humble aluminium sardine tin as a base to form a "literal earthly paradise." That work of hers explored and exposed her country's flora and plants imported there as part of its history. When she was invited to exhibit in Lanka, she made a sub-set of that series but focused on our "venerated plant species" that have both sacred and social meanings such as the Bo tree, the Lotus, Frangapani (temple flower) and which are used by the communities living here as a way of reflecting how and why they select plants for veneration. That exhibition was titled 'A Transit through Paradise' and reflected Hall's 'notion' of paradise as a word, a place, an idea - that name being long associated with Sri Lanka as a lost Garden of Eden, a place of abundance; of resplendent natural beauty and an island once known as Serendib. Having her own notions of this term, her work conveyed a number of ways where in contemporary Sri Lanka, the lives of many are anything but paradisiacal. And she offered her perspective of how we may wish or choose to use our earthly paradise. |
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