A padayal is an offering made in a spirit of reverence and remembrance honouring deities, ancestors and the living relationship between people, land and memory.
Kaluvankeni, Batticaloa, is surrounded by the sea on three sides. It should have been a place without limits. Yet for Thangeswaran Wigneswaran, boundaries appeared early, not etched on maps but enforced through fear.
Raised in the coastal Vedda community where fishing and woodcutting sustained daily life, he recalls walking along the beach as a child and noticing lines of kallichchedi marking the land. When he asked his father why they were there, the answer was direct.“Within these borders, we may work. Beyond them, we will be beaten.”
That memory never left him. Even today, Wigneswaran asks a question that sits at the heart of his practice – when the sea and the coast belong to no one, how do claims of ownership become tools of exclusion, control and violence?
He remembers a time when the village came alive with festivals. Folk performances unfolded across open spaces – Koothu forms such as the tiger dance and bear dance alongside many other traditional art practices. Today, none of them remain.
He draws a parallel between this cultural disappearance and the vanishing abundance of the sea. Fish stocks that were once plentiful are no longer the same. With the arrival of modern fishing technologies, the traditional practices of indigenous communities have been steadily undermined and exploited. The collective fishing method where many bodies moved as one, pulling nets together from the shore, has disappeared.
Along with it, the soft strains of lullaby-like folk melodies that once rose during the collective fishing have faded from memory. Where voices once sang in rhythm with the tides, engines now dominate. Fishing nets have been replaced by tractors.
This rupture, he laments, has not only erased cultural practices, but has also scarred the environment itself. What was once sustained through care, cooperation and song is now marked by extraction, pollution and loss.
After attending university, Wigneswaran resolved to dedicate his artistic practice to affirming the identity of his community.
Ritual was the vessel through which identity was shaped, transmitted, and sustained within his community. As a child, Wigneswaran closely observed these practices not as distant performances but as living encounters.
Reflecting on this, he states, “My artistic practice is shaped by lived experience, memory and ancestral knowledge. My maternal grandfather, known as Kulluwanse, was a seeya – the leader of the village. Although he passed away before I was born, his presence was made known to me through ritual and spiritual practice.”
Compelled to understand these experiences more deeply Wigneswaran began collecting the ritual tools and instruments once used by his grandfather. This act of gathering became a means of retracing lineage – assembling fragments of identity and cultural inheritance through material form.
This process finds expression in Utthiyagal, a sculpture presented in this exhibition. He explains,
“From the land of my own village that was taken away, I recovered tree roots and women’s seethai (sari) cloths. It is through these materials that I created this work.”
His work also draws deeply from everyday practices within his community – fishing, woodcutting and mat weaving using palmyra leaves. These were not merely forms of livelihood but systems of knowledge passed down through generations. “As a child, I accompanied my grandmother to collect the leaves and learned to weave mats and boxes alongside her,” he says.
In his work Kovvai, Wigneswaran returns to memories of childhood, imagining the landscape as it once existed. The coastal forest areas of Kaluvankeni village and the plants that once spread freely across household fences re-emerge vividly, evoking a time when nature, labour and daily life were closely intertwined.
“This work speaks about the food practices, medicinal knowledge and ritual uses found among the Indigenous communities of our village,” he explains.
Among indigenous and rural communities, kovvai is used in traditional medicine to address blood sugar imbalance, inflammation, wounds, fever and skin ailments. Embedded within these practices is an understanding of the plant not simply as sustenance but as a bearer of healing knowledge and ancestral continuity.
Today, Coccinia grandis sits in a state of contradiction. Long valued within indigenous knowledge systems for its cultural and practical uses, the plant has, in some parts of the world, come to be labelled “invasive” after being introduced beyond its native range as a food or ornamental plant. What was once nurtured and useful is now, in certain contexts, seen as problematic or out of place.
In Wigneswaran’s exhibition, Coccinia grandis appears as a quiet presence shaped by these changing perspectives. It speaks to survival and adaptation while also raising questions about belonging, inviting us to consider how living things, like people and cultures, are redefined as they move across places and systems.
Wigneswaran’s work is on show in Batticaloa until April 26.