Above: detail images of ‘Protect’ – a wave and a killer whale. Mother and baby orca swim the vast waters of oceans. After 17 days of grief, surrounded by her pod, J35’s finally releases her dead calf.
Title: Protect
Up cycled Medium: Discontinued commerical textile, some discarded apparel textile, remnant marine rope
Dimensions: total of panels approximately 22 feet by 7 feet
The grouping of words above is the foundation for my latest art on stage, PROTECT, created especially for Sandbanks Music Festival 2018. PROTECT is left open to interpretation, so that you, the reader, can connect with the piece in your own way.Method and Details
Faces: This is my first attempt at creating human faces in a stage-art installation. Graphic and modern elements are characterized in the elongated, bare-featured profiles that emphasize their two-dimensional flatness.
Some of the faces in PROTECT are that of dealmakers, speaking over endangered mammals with a tanker spill in the background. The toxic mix depicted is one of bitumen sand and diluent. Under the word “Progress,” where the quotes signify irony, I attempt to capture in colourful textile the prism rainbow-like effect oil has on water.
The faces to the right are that of protestors, defending the natural environment as chinook salmon swim by.
Southern Resident Killer Whales: On the right is an ethereal hot air balloon with the word Protect stitched in. Cradled below by repurposed marine ropes is a scene of grief and mourning. This section of the installation is my reinterpretation of a recent, moving watercolour painting, SEE ME, by Washington State artist, Lori Christopher. The piece sent my imagination in search of my own idea of the loss and letting go felt by J35, nicknamed Tahlequah, who is the 20-year-old orca mother and member of the long-studied J Pod of Southern Resident Killer Whales.
Bio
Suendrini Goonesekera is a self-taught visual artist, born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and brought up in Dubai, UAE. She later immigrated to Toronto, Canada. After obtaining a diploma at Humber College (2001) for Interior Design, she spent seven years in corporate design and was exposed to environmentally considerate LEED-certified projects. This led Suendrini to explore her passions at the intersection of materiality, conscious design and the world around her, through creativity. It was during this time that she became aware of volumes of resource-rich textile sample books that had been disposed of, as they were “out of trend.” Not long after, she committed ecological thinking to the heart of her creative practice and developed her now trademark, eco-friendly methodology to create her first up cycled textile piece out of numerous reclaimed, high-performance textiles. Her work has since received the Manly E. MacDonald Award for Excellence from Art In the County (Prince Edward County, Ontario, 2013) and the Helen Frances Gregor Award from Craft Ontario (2016). Suendrini’s work includes private and international commissions as well as ecologically conscious art-stage-designs.
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