M ahen Perera has been responsible for some of the most beautiful pictures ever painted in Sri Lanka.  (I was so taken up with one particular canvas, I used it for the cover of my first edition of The Good Little Ceylonese Girl.) His pictures then were always of fruits and flowers, of ruined interiors with chequerboard floors and broken arches: and almost always they had an air of mystery about them, a luminous, incandescent quality hard to convey on canvas. Fast forward five years: A first class Fine Arts Honours Degree from La Salle College Singapore, and a prestigious Winston Oh Travel Award later, and Mahen's work seems to me to have changed radically.

Q: What made you change?

A: First of all, I don't consider that my work has changed. It is more a continuation, an extension of what I have always done. I studied Bioscience at school and was always interested in the dissection of animals, in the rendering of curves and shapes of natural formations. There was a natural progression from this to the rendering of ruined architectural space, suggesting decomposition and fragmentation, the wear and tear of everyday life. It is all about looking at spaces undergoing natural mutation, and the distortion of objects.

I realised too that my own emotions had to be involved in the production of this art. It was not enough that the buildings were distorted in a pictorial context; I had to ruin the canvases too. That meant I had to sand, rip and squeeze them, and wash them as I would with clothes. As a result my emotional involvement with the work was that much stronger. There was a desire to erase, to try to create unexpected visual forms, new, more inventive possibilities.

Q: Do you think people will understand this art?

 A: In these days of the internet and electronic media, people are bombarded by knowledge and experiences. I would hesitate to tell them how they should feel or experience my art. I would, however, like people to be provoked and stimulated!

Q: Would you want people to understand you or themselves in your art?

A: Both. First you need to understand the transformation the materials have undergone. The materials need to tell their own story. It is like studying the physiognomy of a face to get a clue about a person's character. You can work backwards from understanding the process to understanding the artist, and also perhaps gaining some understanding of yourself.

The observer is like a physician trying to diagnose an ailment not immediately recognisable. Ultimately he has to rely on his own intuition, bringing into play his own experiences, as well as whatever evidence the patient provides.

Q: So the process is important to you in creating your artwork?

A: The process is what feeds my artwork. I start manipulating the materials. I like the way the material surrenders and punctuates itself according to my feelings, emotions and desires. If you take some of the objects, the process involves wrapping, sewing and mummifying, and turning them into unfamiliar masses of matter. When people look at them, it connects with their idea of what might lie inside. If you think about presents under a Christmas tree, their aura lies in the packaging: the moment you open them they lose much of their interest, and their "value"!  

Q: All this is a far cry from your original work! Are you perhaps like the doctor who has operated on his patients so often that the outside appearance no longer interests you, that only the insides of the patient matter?

A: That's a fair analogy. It is an intuitive growth from one to the other.

Q: Looking at your work, there seems to be an obsession with raw, earthy flesh, the contents of a butcher's shop, almost!?

A: You always try to question the relationship between your body and the earth, and in your art you try to touch base with that. There is an instinctive desire to re-enact the primal connection, and my work does seem to embody the phallic, the womb-like, the embryonic nature of life; the sheer physicality of natural creation.

Also, by physically investing my own emotion in these objects, I find I have invested them with a certain power and energy of their own.

Mahen Perera's exhibition, Time Lost And Found, will be on at Barefoot Gallery from June 1 onwards.

Ashok Ferrey will conduct a one day Creative Writing Workshop at the Sri Lanka Press Institute on Wednesday, May 27. For details contact: sumaya@slpi.lk