Layla Gonaduwa

The silverfish is the insect that eats books, and Layla Gonaduwa gave one an entire chronicle to consume. For her installation of that name she took the text of the Mahavamsa, the great Sinhala chronicle that underwrites so much of how the island tells its own story, and rearranged it, so that the fixed account of who the country is and where it came from began to slip and reorder under the reader’s eye. The point of the work is quiet and sharp at once: the record that presents itself as settled history is a made thing, arranged by someone, and what one hand has arranged another can take apart.

She arrived at this by an unlikely road. She studied economics and worked as a banker before she gave herself to art, and she is largely self-taught, having found her way through the Cora Abraham Centre under the painter Nalini Weerasinghe rather than through the formal art schools she had chafed against as a child. She ran a secondhand bookshop for a time, and the paper and print of that life settled into the work; so did the years spent close to the mechanics of money and value. Her practice grew out of the kiln, out of fusing coloured glass and enamel onto sheets of copper, and it widened from there into paper, text, drawing, installation and sound, each material chosen for what it could hold rather than for any allegiance to one discipline.

What the materials hold is the seam where the private life meets the public one. Her early solo exhibitions read as an autobiography told backwards: ‘Dreamweaver’ in 2012, its fired enamel drawn from the upheaval of the Hambantota development; ‘MemoryScape’ at the Barefoot Gallery in 2013, thirty wall pieces in copper and enamel; ‘A Quieter Place’ in 2014, a long meditation on what is hidden and what is shown; and ‘Angle of Incidence’ at Barefoot in 2016, where the theme turned to perception and the instability of identity. The autobiographical current keeps running into the political one, and ‘The Silverfish’ is where the two become a single gesture.

That gesture has carried her onto larger platforms. She showed ‘The Silverfish’ at the Colombo Art Biennale of 2014, under its theme of making history, and the work travelled onward to Kochi and to venues in Britain; she has taken part in Colomboscope in 2019 and in the Pettah Interchange project, working alongside artists from Sri Lanka and abroad. Across all of it she has kept to her own slow, concept-led method rather than to the movement of trends.

Which is why the silverfish remains the truest image of her practice. It works on paper patiently, in the dark, changing the record letter by letter until the story it held is no longer quite the same, and it asks, without raising its voice, who wrote the version we had been reading as truth.