Tilak Samarawickrema's account of his own working life in design, gathered under the subtitle Art, Craft, Architecture. It spans roughly four decades of practice, and it moves across the disciplines he has worked in rather than settling in any one of them.
The book takes in his involvement with the National Design Centre; the tapestries he produced with weavers in Talagune; his line drawings, which draw on the forms of Sinhala calligraphy; and his architectural projects, which run from private houses to industrial and commercial buildings. Those four strands give the book its shape. A reader following it from one end to the other is following a single designer moving between craft, graphic work and building, and the connections between those areas are the author's own rather than an outside commentator's.
Because Samarawickrema is writing about work he made himself, the perspective throughout is first-hand. This is a designer's record of what he did, where and with whom, rather than a survey or a critical study of Sri Lankan design more broadly. The weaving at Talagune is described by the person who set it up; the buildings by the person who designed them.
Published in English by Vijitha Yapa Publications, the long-established Colombo house whose list covers Sri Lankan subjects across fiction and non-fiction. The book sits in the architecture and design shelf of that list, though its interest extends past architecture into textile craft and graphic art.
It will suit readers following modern Sri Lankan design and architecture, students of the island's craft traditions and the way they have been carried into contemporary production, and anyone who has encountered Samarawickrema's tapestries or line work and wants the account of how it came about. For buyers abroad, it is a direct source on a body of Sri Lankan design work that is not widely documented elsewhere in English.
- Author: Tilak Samarawickrema
- Publisher: Vijitha Yapa
- Language: English
- Pages: 264
- ISBN: 9789556651805
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