Turning Corners
Shenuka Corea
Lower Gallery, 2024 Acrylic paint
on a mahogany folding screen (442.5 x 630 mm)
Fabrication support: Hatch Maker Studio
Lunuganga is a maze. Paths lead you to unexpected destinations, vistas open up in front of you out of nowhere, you turn corners to find yourself back at the place you had just been. It is a maze to be lost in, not one you would want to find a way out of.
It is a place of hidden things. It is unlikely that you will uncover everything there is to be seen in a single visit. You can return again and again and a new discovery will still take you by surprise.
The garden doesn’t feel like it is beholden to showing you the way. It is a place that belongs to the trees, plants, creatures and objects that inhabit it. You feel like a guest in a temple of a religion that isn’t yours. A calico cat vanishes through the vines to where I can’t follow it.
This folding screen, influenced by time spent in the Roman pavilion, captures what it is like to move through the space of Lunuganga, uncovering new views and discovering openings to unexplored spaces while encountering some of the garden’s inhabitants: a ruddy mongoose, a blue day moth, a ghost...
How do you uncover the
queerness of a space?
Shenuka Corea
A3 double-sided greyscale print with die-cuts
Printed on 180 gsm drawing paper. Acid Free / Chlorine Free / FSC certified. 297 x 420 mm, 105 x 148 mm (folded)
Lunuganga is a place where the order, of a carefully planned and pruned garden, and the disorder of nature allowed to have its own way, exist side by side. In his writings Bawa describes how the garden evolved over the forty years he worked on it. “Sometimes the garden planned itself– the shape of some tree or shadow pointing the way”.
Bawa imagined “centaurs in pineapple fields”. The elements of the ancient, the mystical and the mythological, that the visitor comes upon in the garden, seem to have emerged from the landscape itself.
The balance of order and chaos, the garden’s gradual evolution, the inevitability of its form and the escape into the imaginary, feel aligned with queerness and the winding shapes that queer lives tend to take.
In this zine images from the garden are combined with text that describes aspects of nature that feel queer. Things in nature change, travel, merge and ripple in ways that are beautiful and indecipherable. Nature, free of socially constructed ideas of what is normal and natural, takes its own course.
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Mapping the Unseen with Shenuka Corea
Saturday, 18 May 2024
1pm–4.30pm
Lunuganga, Bentota
LKR 3,000 (includes transport to and from Bentota, lunch & tea)
Scholarships available, please write to us at: programmes@gbtrust.net
Register here
Animator, illustrator, comic artist, and storyteller Shenuka Corea will lead a counter-mapping workshop focused on hidden histories to mark the launch of her corresponding zine. This activity seeks to frame the garden from new perspectives of hidden histories and consider mapping as a practice of documentation to uncover what lies beneath the view of the naked eye or beyond a first glance
Participants will work together to create a collaborative counter-map of the garden based on their observations, photographs and drawings.
The zine and workshop is part of The Order of Nature, a curatorial project exploring the intersection of queerness, architecture, and landscape design within Lunuganga.