Picking Up The Threads

In the hands of Geoffrey Bawa and his contemporaries—Ena de Silva, Barbara Sansoni and Riten Mazumdar—textiles were an intimate collage of culture

- Mayank Mansingh Kaul

Occupying an entire expansive wall of the living room in House No 11—Geoffrey Bawa’s home in Colombo—is a patchwork of Balinese vintage textiles. Hand-painted on cotton using natural dyes and pigments, the long horizontal registers depict ancient stories and myths. They reflect the aesthetics of textiles and painting that South East Asia and Sri Lanka have shared for several centuries, instantly reminiscent of the narrative art traditions in India—kalamkari in the south, mata ni pachedi in the west, phad in the north-west and pata in the east.

The collage induces, in an onlooker, something hypnotic. One is drawn to the intricate details of its human figures, and simultaneously compelled to stand at a distance to marvel at the larger, sweeping scale of its landscape. Faded in parts, flaking in others, a torrent of colour in one corner showing a frenzy of activity, and in another, a quiet manner of repetitive motifs—the eye doesn’t stop. I find myself wondering, isn’t this quite like Bawa’s simulation of a new architecture itself? A truly original expression of modernity or contemporaneity— however one wishes to look at it—and more? Or perhaps, eluding definition, something entirely its own?

Here it becomes important to read, as they say, between the lines, and to feel the space between things: an antique sculpture and a handmade basket, a gothic window frame next to a tarnished doorway, a stark white industrial chair paired with a colonial-period stool, a terraced garden becoming one with the sea. And it may seem this very same eclecticism ran across his use of textiles as well; but in the case of fabrics it went beyond.