Imagining New Natures: Collaborations with Ena

Marking the conclusion of the centenary celebrations of Ena de Silva, internationally known art innovator and batik designer, a new exhibition centered on her work and her collaborations will open at the Barefoot Loft Gallery on October 27, 2023. Titled, Imagining New Natures – Collaborations with Ena, it explores the trajectories of textile and batik design in Sri Lanka that were innovated in Ena de Silva Fabrics’ workshops and commissioned projects.

The exhibition focuses on how Ena’s unique approach to design created a new aesthetic for batik and textile art in South Asia. While examining the early phases of Ena’s career, the exhibition brings together never-before seen designs and projects produced in close collaboration with prominent artists Anil Gamini Jayasuriya (Ena’s son), Laki Senanayake, Ismeth Raheem, Hema Dharmasena, and Padmini Jayasinghe. Exhibited together for the first time, they amplify that experimentation with form and technique led to the emergence of a new textile art that challenged the use, representation and value of batik and its narratives as a “traditional” craft.

The exhibition directs us to re-imagine nature with its intersections among Sri Lanka’s varied ecologies as a metaphor for the ways that Ena de Silva and her collaborators reflected on societal and environmental changes in a post-independent Sri Lanka. In the exhibition, drawings, maquettes, templates, drawings, paintings and completed textiles share in elevating the transformative work of Ena as well as of each of her collaborators.

Establishing a model for collaboration, the exhibits suggest how conceiving the island’s “new natures” point toward the potential for balance, a fragile synchronicity of spirit and agency with the creation of new worlds, ideas that still resonate today. Major commissioned works completed by Ena de Silva Fabrics will be shown alongside individual works by each of the artists.

The concluding events of the Ena 100 Celebrations also include the establishment of the Ena de Silva Foundation, a not-for-profit and public trust set up earlier this year. The Ena de Silva Foundation aims to preserve, maintain, collect, and archive the works of the late artist to continue the craft legacy and support the livelihoods of the craftspeople of the Aluwihare Heritage Centre.

One of the objectives of the Foundation is to develop research, education, and innovation initiatives to strengthen and sustain the livelihoods of the craftspeople at the Centre. An archiving project has commenced in this direction, documenting the various textile works and the craft process itself. Documentation of oral histories of the various collaborators, friends, and family of Ena has also begun. This exhibition with its accompanying short essays is the first of many activities that the Foundation intends to undertake to preserve Ena’s legacy for the future.

The exhibition, ‘Imagining New Natures – Collaborations with Ena’, will be open to the public from October 27 to November 9, 2023 at the Barefoot Loft Gallery; open from 10.00 am to 6.00 pm all week; presented by the Ena de Silva Foundation and supported by the Geoffrey Bawa Trust and the Aluwihare Heritage Centre.