Kaluwara serving bowl
Ceylon ebony, dense enough to blunt a chisel in an afternoon.
$260
Nimal Gunasekara
- Gunasekara carving shed
- Ambalangoda, Southern Province
- 1989
Ambalangoda is the mask town. Every workshop on the main road carries kolam and sanni masks for the dance dramas, and Nimal trained on those — eighteen sanni faces, each one a different illness, each one with a fixed set of proportions you are not permitted to improve.
He carves objects now rather than faces. Kaduru for the light work, because it is soft, pale and takes detail without splitting. Kaluwara — Ceylon ebony — for anything that has to last, which is dense enough to blunt a chisel in an afternoon and heavy enough that people are surprised when they pick it up.
The chisels were his father's. They have been reground so many times that three of them are half the length they started at, and he keeps a fourth that is worn past use in the drawer, unused, for no reason he has ever given.
