art making & exhibiting 2023

chenuki gunasekera

Whales, majestic creatures on this planet that we take for granted. Chenuki Gunasekera’s work displays a pondering moment in the future where generations after us discover extinct whale bones. She demonstrates this by crafting and setting the artwork underwater with a submarine in the centre of the artwork and a whale skeleton on the ocean bed. The skeleton is an extension/connection to her second artwork of her series, Gentle Warror (2023) [a clay skeleton] , creating an illusion of where that skeleton would end up. The submarine is placed in the middle with a light surrounding it to create the illusion of a source of hope. Gunasekera used mixed media to accentuate the texture of her artwork; oil and acrylic, creating both smooth and rough textures. Her personal connection to whales and their symbolism of hope and the relationship between life and death, drove the artworks into a timeline, being the end of the cycle of life and death. The submarine was inspired by the movie Avatar: The Way of Water, which is a movie that explores the connection of whales with people, land and generations and the plot explores the invasion of humans and their will for discovery through destruction. This heavily related to her inspiration toward the connection of whales and the concept of life and death being a cycle where in the end we always give back to mother nature.