CHANGING OUR VIEWS ON ART
T he second session for TEDxColombo was by a duo. Namely, Chinthaka Thenuwara & Poornima Jayasinghe – Co-Founders of Collective of Contemporary Artists (CoCA). The duo was up on stage to talk about how “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”.
For them, Art is not a noun. It is a verb. Chinthaka explained how, suffering from Dyslexia, he would think through images. He learned about being an artist by being with people. He met another artist (Poornima) and began incorporating art into their daily lives. Chinthaka and Poornima set up a place to work on their art - CoCA Art. By making use of discarded or unused materials or objects, the duo set up space in such a way that the objects all had their own stories and people could add their own stories.
Chinthaka and Poornima have also used these materials to create living works of art. One example was with a bicycle. The bicycle was mounted onto a frame that was connected to a dynamo. The energy generated by peddling the bike would power the dynamo which was connected to a speaker.
The speaker would then play back sounds of nature etc. Another example of living art was a lineup of musical plants. Touching a leaf on a plant would generate a tone. This encouraged people to experiment with touching different leaves to generate tunes.