Sagarika Sundaram: Weaves and Wows

TOWARDS THE middle of our conversa­tion, I ask Sagarika Sundaram, a contemporary artist from New York, born in 1986, to remember one of her earliest childhood memories related to art. In the next few seconds, Sundaram remembers herself as a sev­en-year-old girl inside the Shri Krishna Temple in Dubai—she spent much of her childhood there—completely mesmerised watching a pujari making motifs along with creating dresses and ornaments for the idols. “For me, the pujari’s work was art, with everything so colourful, vibrant, and creative,” says Sundaram, dressed in a bright blue knit­ted dress, almost an ode to the colours that we see in her artworks. She wears long woven silk fabric earrings, her face glowing despite having reached New Delhi from New York just a day prior to her first solo exhibition, Polyphony, in one of the city’s leading art galleries, Nature Morte. According to her, she’s building compositions, with lines overlapping and coming together, sometimes moving away but invariably being a part of the work. “You decide, whether it’s harmony or disharmony to you,” says Sundaram.

There are many reasons why stakeholders of art should sit up and take note of Sundaram’s monumental abstract works. The artist’s sculptures have been exhibited at prestigious venues and shows, including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York, British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK, Chicago Architecture Biennial and Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, to name just a few. In 2022 she was also awarded the presti­gious Hopper Prize.

Sundaram’s textile installations are strong sculpturally and architectur­ally, with colour, composition, and form coming together to create vibrant works of art that pulsate with energy. Her work investigates the source of felt fabric, borrowing from her memories of childhood when she would visit the ancient temples of South India or her lessons as a student of art.

The elaborate process of Sundaram’s art requires the artist to separate the wool with her hands, feel its texture, and hand-dye it before adding layers to the work laid on a large, flat surface. She builds the work in layers from back to front, walking on the flatly laid out com­position. One can’t help but compare this particular act to the traditional wine making process of pigeage wherein grapes are crushed under feet to extract more flavour, colour and texture. She then moves around to see and feel the work in an almost meditative manner, she wets the entire composition in soapy water, pressing it down with her palms before tightly rolling the entire “self-created” fabric. The process allows for colours to both merge and stand out as magnificent abstracts that have an element of surprise not just for the view­ers but also for the artist given that the face of the work reveals itself only when she flips it over and cuts open the piece to unearth the layers within.

Later, Sundaram, in assembling her textile sculptures, synony­mous with her signature style, makes incisions with surgical pre­cision and gives them a structural composition through thick wires that are inserted within the fabric. “Think of the felt fabric as skin and the wires or pipes within the body as bones that are giving the work its structure,” she explains.

“I love the secrets that are hid­den inside the fabric. It’s as new for the viewers as it is for me,” she says, looking at Mother of Pearl with its vibrant strands of fabric that she’s cut open in strategic locations to reveal colourful designs to further raise the curiosity of a viewer. Is it a bedsheet that’s been torn apart or is it an invitation to snuggle in one? Is it an ode to hand-embroidered shawls where the back of a work is equally important as the front that grandmothers often explained as the hallmark of good embroidery? Could her other work, Flame of the Forest, have an element of eroticism with the bountiful flora that’s depicted even though there’s an overriding element of abstractionism there? Another work has a scooped-out hole with strands of fabric running amok—is it the pebble’s ripple effect or a bullet that’s pierced through? The titles of her work often come to her while she’s working. “They just happen,” she says, taking a final look at her works that have been installed in the gallery, peering closely to observe if the lights have been fixed properly prior to the big launch.

Sundaram reiterates that she wants people to interpret her works on their own. “The openness to interpretation has to be there,” she says. The artist particular­ly enjoys observing viewers, catching up on conversations wherein people tell her about their versions of her work. What are her thoughts when she’s creating her art? “I am equally excited and nervous when I create my works, I’m focusing on the process and within that, everything unfolds,” she says.

IN ONE OF the videos on her social media page, Sundaram climbs a ladder inside her studio to walk on her mammoth composition, examining it closely and patting down yarn with her hands, pressing them further with the pressure of her feet. Complex as they are, and so grand in scale, the artist sometimes makes paper models with strategic cuts and folds to gain certain ideas and insight of the design and dimensions of her textile sculptures.

It’s hard not to think of the method­ologies of artists such as Jackson Pollock, Shanti Dave, and Mrinalini Mukherjee while knowing about Sundaram’s elaborate creative process. Pollock, widely celebrated for his ‘drip technique’ in his abstract art had intense physical engage­ment between the canvas, colours, and himself. In the case of Dave, his vast canvases were laid on large wooden boards, even as he sometimes lay down while pouring hot wax on the canvas. Mukherjee’s sculptures in Indian hemp were created through a laborious process of the artist using her hands to treat the fabric that transformed into large-scale, grotesque forms. “It’s like the traditional way of making achchar, Indian snacks, and sweets. It’s a multistep process and you have to involve your hands in the overall process for it to have that ultimate feel and flavour,” reasons Sundaram when I ask her about the importance of making felt fabric instead of buying it.

Sundaram says that she finds inspiration in everything creative. Her time at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, in her own words, taught her to “think” while Parsons in New York, from where she earned her Master’s in Fine Arts, specialising in textiles, gave her the outlook to keep working on her own. She notes that studying in Rishi Valley School, Andhra Pradesh, and getting introduced to various art practices, particularly batik painting, spurred her interest in the direction of textile art.

“It’s not a single moment that is definitive in art. It has taken me ten years to arrive at a place even though I’m still on the path to keep dis­covering,” says Sundaram, comparing the process of her artistic journey as akin to riyaaz or rigorous practice, a term of­ten used in Hindustani classical music. “The works,” she says, “are like raagas opening up, as ideas that develop, allow­ing me to go deep into them, explore and improvise along the way.” Indeed, just as a musician needs to listen to music in order to sing better, in Sundaram’s case, her lessons as an art student in various places allowed her to imbibe and gain clarity about her own artistic vision.

Her art evokes nostalgia, especially given India’s rich legacy of living textile traditions. Some works will make you think of brightly coloured scrawls and doodles that children make with, well, ‘felt pens’ or they might transport you to homes where family members sat and created embroidered works not just as a community exercise but also as means of livelihood.

There’s a spirit of enquiry in her works, especially when one looks at Source, a large-scale three-dimensional circular work in hues of natural whites, reds, and muddy brown, which takes centre stage at Nature Morte. Source, while belonging to Kiran Nadar Mu­seum of Art, was shown at Sundaram’s first solo show in 2023 in Palo Gallery, New York. All the other works on dis­play are new with the artist investing, for the first time, in mosaic art. Thousands of Italian smalti or specialised mosaic tes­serae (small stones) have been arranged by colour gradients to reveal even more complex, brightly coloured abstracts.

In an essay on the artist, cultural pro­ducer Andrew Gardner comments: “In Sundaram’s work, felt is a bridge between thousands of years of human ingenuity, a tribute to the techniques and traditions that unite us… while her practice is global in its methods, Sundaram’s work comes from a deeply personal place, an evocation of a peri­patetic childhood growing up between India and Dubai, and her adult years living across three continents.”

Sundaram, who was also commis­sioned for a major work for the UBS Lounge which was displayed at Art Basel, Miami Beach in December 2024, is gearing up for her next solo show at Alison Jacques Gallery, London, in October 2025. Peter Nagy, artist and founder of Nature Morte, who was introduced to Sundaram’s work on social media, is particularly fascinated by the artist’s laborious process of creation, particularly in times where we are only concerned with instant gratification.

Sundaram’s work, which has no short-cuts, serves as an antidote to rapid production and consumption. “When I’m thinking of compositions is when the quiet time helps,” she says. Though she listens to all sorts of music, she likes to go over the thousands of vinyl records that belong to her husband, a profession­al DJ and artist in his own right. Married barely a month ago, Sundaram quips that she was in her studio the next day, working and creating fabric sculptures for the upcoming exhibitions. Is there a routine that she follows? “Not at all,” she sighs. “Sometimes three-four hours, sometimes, over 10 hours, it’s erratic,” she says of her work schedule, before shrugging her shoulders and adding, “I love it; I love my work.”

(Polyphony by Sagarika Sundaram is on display at Nature Morte, Delhi, till February 23)

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