It was a Facebook post of Kalapola 2020 which drew my attention to the wood carvings. Numerous pictures and posts were being shared by many painters and sculptors but these particular wooden wonders caught my eye because of their uniqueness. There was something primordial about the style: as if the works have emerged from a faraway forest tribe. The sculptures were reminiscent of fairytales and old ways. I was intrigued and decided to contact the artist.
As with most artists, Mahesh Jayawardene too has been artistically inclined even as a child. He says his artistic journey took a crucial turn when he got to learn A/L from Mr. Sarath Weerasinghe.
‘I would not be this artist if not for my art teacher. It was he who gave me exposure to sculpting and many other methods in addition to what the school syllabus dictated.’ After A/Ls Mahesh had entered the University of Visual and Performance Arts and had specialized in sculpture for his undergraduate studies.
At present he works as a full time artist and says that even though it could be financially difficult at times, he has no regrets and still prefers the vocation he has chosen to any other. ’I get commissions to do a wide variety of work but I do not consider all of them artistic expressions per se’. He says that he gets to do portraits of well known individuals, statues for religious institutions, garden sculpture as well as plaster and styrofoam carvings for film sets. Mahesh says he is not inclined to do wood carvings often due to the lack of commissions received for them. Instead he opts for model in clay and cast out of concrete and bronze. ‘I was commissioned to do the Wayamba war hero monument as well as a series of monuments for the Panagoda military camp gymnasium. I specialize in figurative work so usually the commissions are also along those lines.’ Mahesh says and goes on to explain.
‘What I displayed at Kalapola was purely my expressive work which was also experimental. Some trees had been cut down at a construction site and I saw parts of the trunks lying around and I could see that they were suitable for artistic creations. So I collected them and waited for a while to gather the tools required for wood carving. Once I had the tools I tried out these sculptures which were directly inspired by nature. The recent forest fires all over the world had deeply affected me, so I carved and burnt the wood to depict climatic changes and natural disasters which we are facing now. Eventually the sculptures began to look as if they had emerged from the fires of the forests.’
I probed more in to the nature of other expressive art work he has done. ‘It is difficult to focus when one has to take commissions to make a living. However, together with some other batch mates I decided to form an anonymous group so that we could do something purely artistic which would enable us to take art to the ordinary people.
This idea was based on the premise that people are capable of understanding and engaging with art if good art is presented to them. We designed a few activities which would demand participation of the chosen communities in addition to the artist group’
Mahesh and his friends had taken their projects to places such as a fishing harbour in Tangalle, a metal recycling workshop in Malwana and a pine forest in Kandy. He says that at the fishing harbour they spent time in understanding the lives and the sentiments of that particular fishing community and when they did the art project at that location, the community also was actively engaged and could understand and appreciate what the artists were trying to do and say
‘At the Malwana iron recycling plant, it was during the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings and the community was mainly Muslim so it was not very easy to approach them, initially. We used the discarded and used materials at the plant to create our work and slowly the community gathered to watch what we were doing. There too they joined in after a while and enjoyed the activity with us.
Another profound experience we had was in Kandy at a pine plantation. The natural forest had been cut down for the pine trees to be planted, and whoever did it had not gauged the adverse environmental impact which the community would be eventually compelled to face. It was a Tamil community and they had no drinking water. The pine trees had absorbed all the ground water and the streams and waterfalls that existed earlier had dried up.
People would go to the kovil to do pooja and perform rituals asking their gods to grant them water. A friend had the idea to recreate a waterfall by using white fabric. The fabric was laid over the rocks of a dried up water fall to create an illusion of a waterfall. It was very sentimental for the community to watch that scene.’
The artistic endeavours had allowed Mahesh and his team of fellow artists to engage and converse with communities which was a rare opportunity which would not have materialised if not for the art project. It is Mahesh’s intention to do more work such as this in the future. He says he plans to open up a sculpture studio, academy and an open gallery one day.
Love for nature and oneness with nature runs through Mahesh, his friends and art. As Marc Chagall said Mahesh has proved that ‘Great art picks up where nature ends’.