Cresside Collette weaves a distinctive tapestry

Collette is not a common name in Sri Lanka and it became even less common post 1956 for historical reasons many have written about.  There’s one Collette who was so in-your-face that it is hard to forget, at least in the case of Sri Lankans interested in politics, journalism and art.  Aubrey. 

This is why there’s a ‘market’, still, for a story about that much respected cartoonist. This is why there was a sizable audience when Cresside Collette spoke about her father recently.  Some individuals are like that.  Their relevancy outlives them.  There’s still a lot to learn from Collette’s cartoons and that’s not for cartoonists and art students alone but the general public. 

Children carry parental genes and you see gene-trace in what they do. And yet, children are not all ‘parental product’ and nothing else; they evolve, learn different things, travel to places their parents have never heard of, make their own lives and craft their own philosophies.  Cresside Collette is Aubrey’s daughter, yes, but she has her own story, father-wrought and father-free.

She grew up in an environment where drawing and painting were encouraged; her father after all had an in-house studio.  She remembers Swarnee Jayawardena, her Art teacher at Bishop’s College, an artist in her own right, as a great nurturing and encouraging influence. 

Cresside’s mother Joan Gratiaen was a journalist who later re-invented herself as a copywriter at Grant’s Advertising under Reggie Candappa.  She was clearly a woman of great courage, for she left Sri Lanka in 1962 along with Cresside and her brother to settle down in Australia.  She was determined to educate her children.  In Australia Cresside was able to study Graphic Art, a field not unrelated to her passion, making wall hangings.  In 1971 she held her first exhibition of wall hangings, in Melbourne.  In 1976 the State Government of Victoria set up the Victoria Tapestry Workshop and Cresside was one of the founder weavers, one of five, chosen after 20 applicants were whittled down to 12.  That Tapestry Workshop, according to Cresside is still a very important part of Victoria’s art heritage. 

She worked there for around 15 years, off and on, but found time to complete a post graduate degree at the Edinburgh College of Art, which at the time was the only university that accommodated tapestry artists. 

After she became a mother, Cresside had to fit work around her children, but still managed to do a Masters at Monash, again in a Tapestry Department.  Throughout this time, she tutored at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, teaching drawing, life drawing and tapestry weaving.  She was attached to RMIT until 2010. 

As of now, Cresside has held over 25 solo exhibitions and some of her work is displayed in her website, www.cressidecollette.com. 

Where did this passion for weaving come from?  Cresside attributes it to watching her grandmother and grandaunts who were heavily into crotchet and embroidery.  The visual, she admitted, meant a lot to her. 

‘There’s a seductive quality to this exercise since one creates it from bottom up.  I “draw” with wool and cotton and my work is “representation”.  This medium helps add the extra dimension.  You get depth of color and texture.  There’s a certain richness that you can’t get with drawing or painting.’

Any art form fascinates those less acquainted with it.  There is precision required in transferring mind-image on to canvass, but the discipline and tenderness of fingers is that much greater, clearly, in tapestry making.  ‘Re-drawing’ on canvas what has been captured in photograph is clearly an art, but it is clearly harder to weave a photograph, so to speak.  Cresside recreates landscapes, sometimes she works outside in the en pleinair or in the open air mode, much like 19^th Century painters.  She ‘paints’ with thread the same kinds of landscapes of course, but her versatility becomes apparent when one peruses the range of subjects, natural and created.  Technology allows 3-D representation but there’s added character or rather the emphasis of certain traits in a subject that an artist can derive.  She does it with thread. 

Cresside says she was lucky.  She was lucky to get a break with the Victoria Tapestry Workshop.  She was lucky, she says, to have had the opportunity to travel and study abroad.  ‘Sri Lanka’, though, was  an untouched subject for more than 40 years, perhaps due to work, studies and bringing up children.  In 2006 she had to write about landscapes.  That was a spark.

‘I surprised myself.  Something innate came out.  I found myself casting back to the expansive landscapes of Sri Lanka that I remembered.’ 

She returned in 2009 and ‘found intensely like-minded people’ which has since been the ‘draw card’.  Now she visits every year, working round a schedule of teaching in France and running her own tapestry tours to the UK and France.  She is currently trying to put together a textile tour of Sri Lanka for a travel agency in Canberra. 

What of her father?  That’s the inevitable question from a Sri Lankan. 

‘I have strong impressions.  Since 1956 I only saw him on Saturdays.  I have pleasant memories.  He had a very busy life, but he took me to the zoo, the museum, the beach and to art exhibitions.   I felt I knew him.  Gentle.  Bit of a dreamer.  He stared into space a lot.  He would drop me at one place and go somewhere else to pick me up.’

She didn’t see him for 26 years.

‘When I re-met him, in 2006, he was familiar.  I found by accident that I had a half-sister who worked in the same building.  I didn’t know what to do, but my boss said I would be mad not to talk to her and to ask about my father.  I feel that had I not taken the initiative we might have never met.  He kept a lot to himself.  But when we met, everything came together, all the threads, his and mine, our lives.’

Art critics will have a different story to tell about Cresside Collette.  A more informed, detailed and nuanced narrative which includes her art journey with and without greats in her field and how, perhaps, she lays out warmth, softness and hard lifelines as she plays with texture and color.  All we can tell when we zoom in on a photograph of something she’s done is that there’s a union between an amazing imagination, a powerful creative force and tenderness in work, a spirituality in fact that complements the eloquence.   She is an accomplished universal who is Sri Lankan as much by birth as by ways of expression and being.  Her father’s name is Aubrey Collette.  Cresside Collette is not a cartoonist, though.  She is not framed by her father or his work.  She uses a different canvas, different instruments and medium.  She is a different kind of artist.       

 

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It is customary to bury the dead

A form of drama that emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by employing disjointed, repetitious, and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations, and plots that lack realistic or logical development.  That’s the description of a particular form of drama called ‘Theater of the Absurd’.  In the 21^st Century where confusion has been globalized courtesy finely orchestrated media campaigns whose sole objective is to justify crimes against humanity and manufacture public consent for the same, the description is valid for any number of things and processes.  In Sri Lanka, perhaps there’s nothing more deserving of that description as the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution.

It was, to recap, thrust down Sri Lankan’s throat by Rajiv Gandhi determined to ‘Bhutanize’ the island, as a logical ‘next step’ to a process of destabilization started by his mother Indira Gandhi in 1982, when the first batch of Tamil militants were trained in India.  It was illegal.  Its legality was obtained by reiteration via elections.  It was rejected quickly enough by the ‘sole representatives of the Tamils’ (self-appointed) and their one-time mouthpieces, the TNA which recovered voice and franchise, paradoxically, courtesy the Sri Lankan security forces in May 2009.  Even today, the Tiger rump which clubs internationally rejects the 13^th Amendment.  No one wants it.  It has benefitted only politicians and only because it serves the political teething necessary to take bigger bites out of the body politic at the national level. 

Those who reject the 13^th do not subscribe to the same political ideology of course.  For some, the 13^th is ‘too much’ while for others it is ‘not enough’.  Either way, it is neither here nor there; not an ‘interim’ option, not a working document for a better text.  It has only served political theatrics of the absurd kind. 

Although the Supreme Court de-merged the North and East, the potential for re-merging remained intact.  The clause for merging of provinces has no logic except to serve India’s purposes, i.e. destabilizing Sri Lanka in the event of a Government that is not as India-friendly as India would like comes to power.  The 13^th is then essentially a Balkanization script awaiting enactment. 

The drama over the ‘Divi Neguma’ Bill demonstrated how a spoiler can scuttle national development initiatives.  It is in this context that a re-visit is called for.  The Cabinet is currently deliberating on the matter.  Those who have traditionally been ‘Pro-13^th’ have asked for time to offer views.  Time has been given and that’s good.  The issue of land and police powers has been raised and remains ‘up in the air’ with both the Opposition (touching but not touching the issue in its much trumpeted recommendations for constitutional reform) and the Government (we’ve only seen the smaller elements of the coalition coming up with strong views) being cagey about definitive statements. 

Meanwhile, an ill-conceived and deformed political entity that has done nothing for the people continues to distract from the core issues of good governance and institutional reform which, rightfully, ought to take center stage in the matter of constitutional changes.  It is for all intents and purposes a dead object whose stench is a nauseating political reality that unsettles post-conflict processes of reconciliation and development. 

Indeed, it robs devolution from whatever logical worth it may have.  The 13^th, after all, is not coterminous with ‘devolution’.  There can be other models.  For example, if taken to its logical conclusion, we would have to leave provinces behind and go straight to the Village Councils.  Alternately, the Eelam-map-fixing 13^th can be done away with to make way for a more logical and scientific re-drawing of provincial boundaries that make for a more equitable distribution of resources and more efficient planning.  The 13^th stops all that. 

If the Government feels charitable in letting the likes of DEW Gunasekera, Rauff Hakeem, Vasudeva Nanayakkara and others to offer views on proposed amendments to the 13^th, it can go the whole hog and put the question to the voting public.  End of story. 

The bottom line is, Sri Lanka’s unity and integrity are not negotiable.  Want another ‘PS’?  ‘We cannot import a solution, and it cannot be a Rajapaksa - Sampanthan agreement.’  It’s a people’s thing and that is exactly what the 13^th Amendment is not!

The 13^th is a political corpse that has being carted from forum to forum, election to election; it is a filthy rug that is posited as banner of conflict resolution.  It was India’s baby.  It is a cadaver that Sri Lanka is saddled with.  It is customary, need we say, to bury the dead. 

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Ethics is a traditional homeland without claimants

The self-immolation of Ven Bowatte Indraratnana Thero raised many questions.  Whatever the late Thero’s intentions may have been, it is unlikely that ‘media ethics’ or lack thereof was something that prompted the horrifying act.  That, however, is what we are left with. 

The action or rather inaction of those who may have been able to prevent the tragedy, especially the journalist who was ‘in the know’ has spurred much debate on what really constitutes ‘responsibility’ for people in the media industry. 

At panel discussion on the subject organized by the Sri Lanka Press Institute, a young journalist Tharaka Basnayake, had asked the following question: ‘How does citizen journalism fits into codes of ethics since almost all the mainstream media outlets encourage citizens to capture whatever they desire and with regard to Indrarathana Thero's self-immolation, most of the ordinary citizens were busy capturing the action with their mobile phones (against their conscience)?’

The question is simple: ‘Is the journalist’s duty to capture spectacle or whatever is newsworthy as per the dictates of professionalism or react humanely to a situation where choice of action/inaction can make a different between life and death?’  Put another way, ‘Can there ever be guidelines to inform a professional when to drop professional garb and when to put on larger humane clothing?’

It is something we can talk about forever. 

The Government has found it fit, under these circumstances, to come up with ‘ethical guidelines’ for journalists.  The Government has been fittingly lampooned in the press for the presumptuousness of the exercise, given the fact that politicians and state media personal have hardly covered themselves in glory on account of ethical behavior. 

The humor, however, should not stop with the Government or the State Media or even journalists in general.  ‘Ethics’ is a rare commodity, so rare that rather than rarity resulting in high value it has reverted to the other extreme in valuation: nothing.   Ethics is talked about.  It is scripted into professional oaths.  It is tossed into advertising copy.  It is almost as though the word would make palatable any excrement as such is dished out by the corporate world or by professional entities.  All it takes is to say, ‘we are ethical’.  But are we? 

This is the age of the spectacle.  This is the era of instant gratification. By omission or commission this world has either embraced or resolved to submit to Mr. Spectacle.  All that glitters may not be gold, but glitter fetches a better price than ethics in the market, let us acknowledge.  Even crap that is glitter-clothed or worse, glitter-labeled, let us add! 

Is he who demands honor, himself honorable?  Is she who demands ethical behavior herself ethical in her behavior?  Who are the saints here?  The truth is that ‘ethics’ cannot be legislated.  They cannot be advertised.  In short there’s no market for ethics.  That’s the brutal fact that is being ignored in the debate. 

Today’s market is full of goods and services deliberately marked with planned obsolescence; things are made to break (sooner rather than later) with adequate caveats in the small print regarding warranties to insure the vendor.  And what’s good for refrigerators, laptops, mobile phones and iPods is good for the media too.  It works.  Stories are re-invented.  A women jumps into a well with a baby and the media shares the savory details in a way that prompts another depressed individual to execute a copy-cat jump that will continue to keep the media in business.  One story is crafted in a way that a follow-up story will result.  So what’s new?  What’s ‘unethical’ about it?  It’s just business as usual in the 21^st Century, isn’t it?

The question can be asked, ‘isn’t this how it always was?’  Yes, there were always neethi (laws) and there were always reethi (customs).  The difference is that in times gone by, the latter prevailed over the former.  The latter drew from an ethical template.      

The incident resulted in an interrogation of the media on the subject of ethics, interestingly by those who really don’t have the right to talk about ethics.  There cannot be ethics in isolation.  There cannot be ethics for some but not for others.  But laws, we know, are selective and prejudiced in favor of the powerful, i.e. those who have money or power or both. 

Still, that fact alone is not enough to settle for ‘business as usual’.  Self-regulation begins with self, it goes without saying.  We, the media, as a tribe, are but one part of society and can claim rightful share to its glories and resolve to own up to its shame.  We could play safe and say ‘let’s see you go first!’ but that’s cop-out option.

We cannot get anyone to pay for even a tiny advertisement pleading ‘Let’s be ethical’.  We can but be ethical, as per our sense of right and wrong, regardless of professional dictates (which too, let us not forget, are for the most part ‘owned’ by corporate prerogatives). 

 

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