Hanusha Somasunderam

The hills above Nuwara Eliya are the image the country sells to the world, rows of tea running green to the horizon, and Hanusha Somasunderam grew up inside the labour that keeps them looking that way. Her grandmother’s hands plucked those leaves; her mother worked the same plantations; and the wage slip that fixed a day’s pay to the exact weight a woman had carried down the hill became, in time, one of her materials. Her art takes the postcard apart to show the people the postcard leaves out, the Hill Country Tamil community whose century of work has been folded into a view that never names them.

She was born in 1988 into that community, one of the most marginalised on the island, and she carried its landscape with her when she went north to study art at the University of Jaffna. The turn in her practice came from a single question put to her by her teacher, the artist and scholar Thamotharampillai Shanaathanan, who asked whether Nuwara Eliya was really beautiful, and then who the people were who made it so. The question redirected everything. She stopped painting the hills as scenery and began to work from the inside of the labour that produces them, from the vantage of a daughter who had watched it done.

The work that answers that question is built from the tea trade’s own things. She takes strainers, teacups and tea bags and turns them into sculptural material, staining porcelain vessels and used bags and marking them with a private iconography: leeches, the cramped line rooms that house plantation families, infants, the hands of a clock, and quotations from the frescoes of Sigiriya set against the women who pick for a living. The wage receipts her mother received, calculating pay by the weight of leaf, sit among them as documents and as evidence. The register is intimate rather than declamatory, and it is the more damning for it.

Her standing has grown from Colombo outward. She is represented by the Saskia Fernando Gallery, and she has shown at the Dhaka Art Summit in 2016, at the Bamyan Cultural Centre in Afghanistan, and in the Open Space project in Colombo curated with Raking Leaves and the Asia Art Archive. Her work reaches beyond the gallery as well: one of her pieces carries the cover of the anthropologist Mythri Jegathesan’s ethnography of the tea estates, ‘Tea and Solidarity’, so that the scholarship of the plantation and the art made from within it arrive on the same jacket.

Which brings the eye back to the hills, and to the difference between the two ways of seeing them. The visitor reads a landscape; Hanusha reads the receipt at the bottom of it, the weight, the wage, the name that the view has spent a hundred years erasing, and she makes the objects of the trade say aloud what the trade would rather keep quiet.