Laki Senanayake (1937-2021)
Laki is seated on a black, high-backed, padded executive swivel chair. He is bare-bodied, in a bright red sarong, dappled sunlight catching his white beard. On the table in front of him is a pair of binoculars, which he picks up frequently to look at the birds in the trees around the pond that he overlooks from a raised open-air platform. Esoteric avant garde music is playing from speakers hidden in the trees.
And everywhere you look, art. Mostly sculpture. A bronze wild boar at the water’s edge. An other-wordly ‘rain tree’ in the middle of the water. A horse on the other side of the pond. A golden sun high up in a tree. An owl looming from the roof. More animals appearing the longer you look. A leopard adorned with geometric shapes in gold and green. A rhinoceros perched on a rock. A tiger attacking a deer in the trees. A unicorn, a hornbill, an emu. The water monitor in the undergrowth turns out to be real. Laki is working on a sculpture right no