Freestyle Wrestlers
Helena Samarasignhe
BA (Hons) Fine Art: Drawing, Camberwell College of Arts
Four South Asian wrestlers engaged in intense combat, muscle tensed, expression focused, invigorated in colour. Embodying resilience, they are uncompromising in scale taking on the form of the Kalighat figure; an Indian painting style with histories of colonial resistance. Through the lens of sport I disrupt notions of brown female submission, mobilising struggle as an active, persistent and combative force. Working with the cross sectional cutout, I disrupt an ability to consume all at once. Muscle, expression, labour revealed and concealed as perspective shifts.
Artist Statement:
I am a British-South Asian artist working at the intersections of painting, drawing and sculpture, using figuration to create vast expanses of the brown, female self. Using large-scale drawings and cut-outs I create figures that physically take up space, pushing against flattening conceptions of racialised docility and submissive endurance.
Taking stylistic influence from Kolkata’s Kalighat painting, I contextualise my work in histories of colonial resistance, reimagining these autonomous figures within the realm of contemporary sport. Positioning the Kalighat figure in a contemporary context, I create expanse not only through scale but through time, carving out space in the past and making space in the present for minoritarian self-discovery.
Working with the South Asian female athlete, I make visible the latent resilience of brown women, a resilience that has been devalued as passivity through continued notions of disembodiment. In using sporting performance as a showcase of embodied resilience, I create scenes of visceral physicality, projecting manifestations of inner strength in rejection to the brown body as vessel. Characterised by tensed muscle and dynamic physical contact, I displace submissive endurance with one that is active, agetic and combative, using the theatrical associations of cut outs to stage my own matriarchal realms.
Here I present charactered embodiments of interiority; exaggerated performers, disrupting reductive reading of visual knowledge as truth. In considering this relationship between physicality and interiority, I work with labour inducive process, wood cutting and large-scale drawing, to embed my characters with a tangible sense of resilience. Here subjects become embodied through the physical endurance of making, my own interiority coded through visceral brush strokes, and abrasive pastel on canvas.
In converging material with meaning, process with representation, my figures symbolically evade reductivity, traces of labour and the alternating perspective of the cut out, dwelling on what is visible and what is concealed at the surface.