Kavan Balasuriya (b. 1992, Colombo, Sri Lanka) earned a B.A. in Fine Art at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London, in 2014. He lives and works between Paris, London, and Colombo.
I am a practising artist and writer who primarily works with drawing and engraving. I explore materiality, linearity, and abstraction using repetition, mark-making, geometry, and architectural motifs.
In my work, I employ aluminium foil and ink to create monochromatic and experimental engravings that fall under the rubric of my drawing practice. I’m interested in exploring the relationships between form and function and how they serve as the basis for abstract compositions. My drawings grew from ink and charcoal to foil as I explored how drawing leads to emergent material phenomena.
Aluminium foil is reflective and sensitive. It is ideal for exploring light and shadow, movement and stillness, surface and depth, as well as abstraction and realism. My practice moves between ink and foil to learn from each medium and the drawing style and processes that accompany it.
The foil reflects light, allowing me to modulate and refract it. The material demands the viewer’s presence as it is sensitive to lighting conditions, making it a perfect vehicle for exploring geometric and gestural abstraction.
The Interstice series explores repetition, tracing, tactile mark-making, reflection, permanence, and impermanence through engraving, embossing, and drawing. Its foil textures evoke the sense of a membrane, with traces of the mark-making process echoing the composition.
My engravings do not produce a printed work, as engravings typically do in traditional printmaking. I treat the foil plate as a standalone art object, exploring its exquisite qualities of material and surface.
I am inspired by the cyclical structures of time that we inhabit. We perceive the instantaneous while living alongside the geological processes of deep time. I see light and shadow as vectors of time and space; the same elemental forces shape the constant change of process and progress.
Contact: kavanbalasuriya@gmail.com