ARTIST STATEMENT
My works incorporate a variety of collected ephemera from the era of global capitalism, including but not limited to: food and consumer product packaging, industrial packaging and materials, homemade religious pamphlets, postal/shipping materials, electrical wires, clothing and textile waste, metal scraps, bureaucratic forms, and magazine clippings. These collected materials are placed in conversation with more personal artefacts centred around migration and maternal lineage. Text is also paramount to my practice: often I incorporate my native English, as well as languages of which I have a character-based/symbolic understanding but in which I lack true comprehension, like Sinhala and Arabic.
For the past year, I have been engaged in the creation of a series employing these three strands. In these works, I hope to narrativize the confusion of ethnographic remains in the wake of a) global plutocratic oligarchies and their collapse and b) the physical migration thus induced. The phrase included in this piece is a Sinhala phrase which directly translates to Where are you going? Coconuts in the basket! and is used when someone’s response has nothing to do with the question asked: to me, an apt representation of the absurd political conditions under which we have perhaps always lived. Materially, this series imagines the visual practices of a society obeying a prehistoric impulse to record their existence but with no memory of raw material, trading instead in image, symbol, and waste products as the new fabric of the natural world.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hasadri Freeman is a Sri Lankan/American artist currently living and working in London, United Kingdom, with a multimedia practice which centres on text and image. Spanning intermedia painting-sculpture works, creative non-fiction, drawing, and screenwriting, she employs a cinematic approach, synthesising a wide range of thematic elements within her pieces. She is topically interested in 20th & 21st century manufactured waste artefacts (single-use or other), craft art and its intersections with women’s histories, ancient illustration practices, morality and the internet, migration and female ego, and the absurd caprices of daily life under global financial regimes. Largely self-taught, she received her BA in Film, Photography, & Media from the University of Leeds and continues to work in diverse settings around the world.
© Hasadri Freeman