New York-based Indian artist Sagarika Sundaram uses hand-dyed wool, silk, bamboo silk, and wires to describe freedom in a new way. Wall mounted or dangling from the roof, the sculptures are not just dramatic pieces of art but are also a riot of colours, engaging viewers in a web of thoughts.
“It’s a labour-intensive process,” describes Sundaram, who works on rolls of raw wool fibre to transform the textile pieces into monumental sculptures. The felt used is hand-made. After laying the raw material on the ground in the form of a wooly, mesh-like membrane, she uses soap and water to transform it into a single piece of material, building the layers from the backside.
“The face of the work is revealed when I flip it over and cut open the piece to reveal the layers within,” says Sundaram, as she executes every piece of artwork with surgical precision.
Born in Kolkata, and raised in Dubai, Sundaram’s fascination with textiles began in childhood. That’s why the installations reflect her multicultural upbringing, interest in nature and ever-evolving experimentation with colour and technique. Themes of transformation and alchemy flow through her work, which she describes as a space for discovery: “In China, they say a work is successful when you can see the artist at play,” she muses. “I love that.”
While an average weight of each piece ranges between 3 kg and 50 kg, depending on the piece and the amount of wool used, if there’s a wire inside, it adds to the weight, but her curious nature is befitting in the manner she presents her pieces. “There’s a moment at the start where I throw certain colours down, or throw fibre down with an energy that guides the way the rest of the composition unfolds. But I never really know what the final composition is going to look like until layers are open to interact with each other,” says the artist.
Sundaram’s solo show, titled Polyphony, is her first in India brought by Nature Morte Gallery, Delhi, this year, and only her second solo show to date, after having premiered her works at the Palo Gallery in New York in 2023, while a major work was recently commissioned for the UBS Lounge, displayed at Art Basel Miami Beach in December last year.
The title of the Indian exhibition refers to her interest in the connections between music and abstraction, while her approach to construct colourful renditions are both intuitive and improvisatory, resulting in works that ebb and flow over time, much like a piece of music.
For her next solo, scheduled at the Alison Jacques Gallery in London this year in October, Sundaram hints at using “more fibre and mosaics”.
