|
|
|
| Sunday, 27 November 2005 |
 |
|
 |
Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
Weaving east into west : Fashion as art by Aditha Dissanayake What would you do with the beautiful wall-hanging elegantly placed on the wall of your sitting room? (a) Make it a "conversation-piece" (b) Wear it to a party". If you have already visited the Barefoot Gallery you would know both answers are correct. If you have not made it there yet, do so imediately before December 4 to find out for yourself how fashion has become art and vis-a-vis.
"Excited?" asks, nay, commands Barbara Sansoni, Chief Designer and Chairperson of Barefoot, introducing this "wool exhibition" a few days before its launch on the 22nd. Impossible to say "No, not really, not when there are more pressing issues like the new presidency and the incessant rain to think of... plus the conviction that after all is said and done, arn't they just simply...well, clothes, because, as flamboyant and brilliant as the tomato red blouse she is wearing, Barbara has undoubtedly added her own vivacity to the exhibition transcending it from a mundane event to one filled with exuberance. Mundane? No, I take the word back. The combined efforts of the designers Niluffer Victoria, Marie Gnanaraj, Preethi Hapuwatte, Shaunagh Aluwihara and Digby Hill, the work on display, in every colour of the sun as he makes his way daily from the East to the West, is anything but mundane. For, the exhibits are not just clothes, wall hangings etc but cross-cultural expressions, confirming the assertion, clothing can be collected as art. More so because the products are conversation-pieces in the real sense of the word. Listen to Barbara explain how this exhibition of "Weaving the East to West" came about and you will know what I mean. "Four weeks ago we were walking through Rome from the Sistine Chapel to the Forum through ancient Rome and yet, still a part of the normal life of the city" Says Barbara "My mind was in a muddled and almost ignorant confusion when we walked down the hill from the road above to the door of the Basilica of St. Clemente and into the stone choir which soared into an apse with a semi-dome covered in beautiful mosaic. Experiencing it was like a clap of thunder - a clear voice from Heaven! Round the base of the apse were large white sheep...below them a line of orange-robed figures - monks. They looked familiar... Between each head (I had to peer up behind the altar) was - hard to believe- a palm tree...further up, above the glorious line of large sheep... a familiar world which I have painted and drawn so often in our jungles - peacocks dancing, spotted deer-ibis and egrets wading - parrots, teal, small animals-among foliage and leaves familiar to me from Yala...High in the centre of the semi-dome was Christ on the cross, swathed in his loin cloth, and below him was his mother with her head draped like a sari. In this 2000 year old church east and west were depicted indivisibly!"Experience this entwining of the East with the West today, at the Barefoot Gallery, this time, through wool. Exciting? Sure. Especially because Barbara Sansoni has a post script to prove her theory that the East and West have been entwined for a very long time. "The monks in saffron robes in the mosaic in Rome, painted 2000 years ago were actually the twelve apostles". |
|
| News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
| Produced by Lake House |
The exhibition, "Weaving East with West", joyously celebrating the old
worlds of Asia and Europe with the western culture of emerging new nations
has designs made with Australian wool-universally acknowledged as the best
in the world, which have been hand dyed and woven on handlooms in Sri Lanka
to designs and colours deigned by Barefoot, thus warping and wafting and
marking the beginning of the cross fertilisation between the East and the
West. 
