A Line In The Earth

A Line in the Earth brings together the practices of Pradeep Thalawatta and Hasseena Suresh, two artists whose works are grounded in the poetics of place, memory, and material. Though shaped by distinct geographies of post-war Sri Lanka and the agrarian landscapes of Kerala, their practices converge in their engagement with the emotional and political afterlives of history, and are reconstituted through time.

The line, at once literal and metaphorical, is a seam that binds and divides, a gesture of drawing and of cutting. It is an image of borders and boundaries, but also of connection, cultivation, and renewal. In the context of this exhibition, the title evokes not only the physical earth, soil, clay, dust but also the deeper strata of human experience that are embedded within it: the residues of conflict, the cycles of labour, the persistence of memory, and the slow but certain work of healing.

Pradeep Thalawatta’s multidisciplinary artworks navigate the unresolved complexities of post-conflict Sri Lanka with subtle intensity. Working across photography, drawing, performance, and installation, he blurs the lines between witnessing and forgetting, public history and private loss. His works trace the contours of a landscape marked by war, urban spaces scarred and reshaped by violence, where the remnants of conflict are not always visible, but acutely felt. Through his lens and mark-making, Thalawatta captures a disquieting stillness, a quietude charged with the echoes of what once was and what remains unsaid.

In a language rooted in earth, Hasseena Suresh sculpts with clay not only as material, but as metaphor. Her forms emerge from a long-standing relationship with land and its textures, histories, and cycles that is cultivated through years of working within a self-sustained ecosystem she has built around her studio practice in Kerala. Her work embodies a feminist ethic of care, protest, and reimagination. Drawing on ancient histories, architecture, and lived experience, she interrogates entrenched patriarchal systems while gently proposing alternative cosmologies, ones that centre nurture, resilience, and embodied knowledge. Her sculptures, simultaneously delicate and defiant, speak of women’s labour, survival, and the capacity of clay to hold both memory and resistance.

This is not an exhibition that seeks to illustrate a single narrative. Rather, it opens a field of tensions: between fissure and repair, absence and presence, mourning and making. The earth itself is a central protagonist here. It holds the weight of our footsteps, absorbs our losses, receives our labours, and returns to us, sometimes transformed with the traces of our being. It is both archive and witness, medium and subject. In Thalawatta’s work, it is the terrain on which violence has unfolded, quietly registering its aftermath. In Suresh’s, it is the generative ground of making, a source of resilience that insists on life even in the face of erosion. Both artists remind us that the earth does not forget, but neither does it remain static; it shifts, cracks,  and regenerates.

To draw a line in the earth is an act of intention. It may be to claim, to divide, to protect, to cultivate. It is a gesture that acknowledges the ground beneath us as living, mutable, and deeply implicated in our collective histories. In this exhibition, that gesture becomes a shared language between two distinct practices, a language that neither erases difference nor seeks easy resolution, but instead holds space for complexity, contradiction, and care.

A Line in the Earth invites viewers to slow down, to inhabit the space between looking and knowing, to feel the textures of both clay and dust, to trace the contours of scars and furrows alike. It offers no simple answers, but instead extends an invitation: to stand at the doorstep the line creates, to listen to what the earth remembers, and to imagine, with quiet courage, what it might mean to begin again.

-Text by Sanchita Sharma