SAGARIKA SUNDARAM: WOOL, WATER, SOAP AND SUNLIGHT
Image courtesy of Sagarika Sundaram
You want to hurl yourself in Sagarika Sundaram’s work, envelop your body in her thick, cocoon-like fabrics with their hidden fissures, pockets and flaps. ‘Some people have said they want to bite into the sculptures and I love that multi-sensory evocation,’ says the New York-based artist. ‘For me that’s when a work feels very full.’ Sagarika creates wall-works, sculpture and installation, working in expanded textile-based techniques - reinterpreting the traditional felt-making process ‘to create an abstract visual and structural vocabulary drawn from botanical and geological forms found in nature’.
She only started exhibiting three years ago, but already she has shown work at Frieze New York, Nature Morte (in New Delhi and New York), and in April showed her felted tapestries at West London’s Frestonian Gallery, alongside works by Sonia Delaunay. In 2022 she was awarded The Hopper Prize, and a Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship.
Image: Form Symbol Installation, Sagarika Sundaram. Image courtesy of
Sagarika Sundaram
Her practice is about making more from less. The most indispensable items in her studio are wool, water, soap, and sunlight. She soaks thick hand-dyed wool in hot water to make an assembly of felted objects, rolling it until the fibres interlock into dense fabric. ‘Understanding the material from first principles, I dye, employ moisture and compression to engineer wool into shapes and forms that express the material’s history, physical strength, and narrative power,’ she explains. ‘My artistic expression is a reflection of that space in nature which is ferocious and dangerous, that uncovers and connects to the deepest, secret parts of myself. Working in expanded fibre-based practices, I treat textile like a body – rupturing the flat surface, revealing what lies beneath layers – the carnal, painful, ugly-beautiful; interrogating what it means to be both of and alien to this world. Through intricately patterned, soft shredded surfaces that express chaos and control, I use abstraction to reinterpret textile as mutant, botanical, and psychedelic forms.'
She loves the fact that felting is so old. ‘It originated in Mesopotamia or the fertile crescent some 15,000 years ago and it spread to all these different parts of the world.’ For her, it is evidence that we are all connected. ‘It’s like a fingerprint.' But Sagarika is very much a 21st-century artist. She often turns her hand-made textiles into performance costumes, sewing the disks of felt together to create membrane-like masks and headdresses - and then films the choreography. ‘Felt is a very strong, hardy material and I almost feel like I’m testing its strength through the work. I use performance to uncover new narratives and contexts by constructing fantasy worlds that employ felted costumes and masks. By estranging what is familiar, I create work that possesses its own unique life.' Her 'Unseers’, Shaman-like figures in cascading robes, are beautiful and hypnotic. ‘In my narrative, they are these introverted beings who are blind, but their vision is projected inward. It's almost like it’s my way of dealing with the external world when it feels so oppressive.’
She describes building a piece as ‘holding this puzzle in my head’. She will engineer the layers and then work in ‘resists’ (mostly pieces of plastic) to create disconnections. ‘When the work dries, I go in from the front and feel for those disconnections, and I slice open the work to create what feels like secret, floral even sexual gestures. I like it when the underside of a piece shows.’
Image: Asia Major,
Sagarika Sundaram. Image courtesy of Sagarika Sundaram
Born in Kolkata, India, she spent her early life in Dubai (where her parents moved). Her first degree in 2008 was in design and visual communication at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. ‘It was set up in the 1960s, on the recommendation of Charles and Ray Eames, by the Indian government. The course was very much print and ink-based, and that’s the hands-on approach I still see in my work today.’ But her desire to work on larger projects led her to look outside of India, starting with an internship at a London design agency.She then moved into strategy in San Francisco, before returning to London to work with an ad agency. Frustrated by corporate life, ‘and bored of spending money on restaurants', she decided to invest in herself and began taking courses at Central Saint Martins, The Handweavers Studio, and Selvedge magazine. ‘I put together a syllabus for myself covering dyeing, weaving, all sorts of aspects of textiles. I went to weave in Colchester with Peter Collingwood, and with Janet Phillips in Somerset. In Cornwall I studied indigo and shibori with Vivien Prideaux. As I discovered textiles, I discovered the UK.’ She also learned to make two-sided felts in Golders Green ‘from a lady named Sue Pearl, on her kitchen table - there was something very playful and mashup-y about the process, which allowed me to be very expressive.’ Back in India she started to design rugs. ‘There’s a correlation between the flat paper and the flat rug.’ But working with weavers, she found her language limited. ‘I wanted to get deeper and speak the language of construction.’
She was accepted to do an MFA in Textiles at Parsons in New York where she started producing felted artworks. ‘I discovered that I enjoyed the process of extending narratives in these abstract ways through sculpture and costume. And when I looked for a home for the work to live, that led me into the world of galleries.'
Image: Swayambhu,
Sagarika Sundaram. Image courtesy of Sagarika Sundaram
She sources indigenous wool from the lower Himalayas and natural fibres from small farms and growers around the world ‘where I know the animals are being treated well’. After her time in London, she developed a soft spot for Wensleydale wool. She uses a mix of natural and synthetic dyes.
A collaboration with artisanal felt-makers in the Himalayas led her to produce 'Wool Brick', a modular textile building block that creates insulating walls and room dividers, tables and seating. It enables zero-carbon architecture and interiors, is circular and returns to the soil. The project won a 2020 Tishman Center Award for Excellence in Climate, Environmental Justice & Sustainability and a Kalil Endowment Grant for Smart Design.
She was thinking of how wool is used for structural strength and protection, and not just as a sweater or a pair of socks. She remembered that Sue Pearl in Golders Green had taught her to make beads by rolling them on top of each other. ‘I thought: What would happen if you layered colour upon colour and made a sphere and sliced it and opened it open?’. She layered wool, red, white, red, white, and then rolled it up and made long tubes. ‘Then I sliced them into discs and put the slices together to create articulated surfaces, which moved in an undulation.' She needed to scale it up, so she contacted a workshop in Himachal Pradesh. On WhatsApp, she showed them videos and pictures of her work and asked, ‘What’s the largest you can make it?’ When they showed her the first spirals, she asked, “Can you put a column inside it so it’s a bit like an eye?’. At the end of the project, the workshop sent her a picture, showing that with the waste from all the slicing, they had made a huge wall art piece in their studio. ‘This made me very happy. They responded to the work and engaged with it in a way that signalled our creative connection beyond the context of a gallery.'
For her show at London’s Frestonian Gallery, she created the new piece, Primavera, a felted wool using botanical dyes. ‘When I worked at Pentagram I lived around Notting Hill and I used to walk to Holland Park. It was springtime and I remember how joyous the flowers were, and it reminded me of seeing the Botticelli painting at the Uffizi Gallery. It's been a tough year with movement being so restricted and I wanted the work to jump out of the gallery and connect with the outside.’
Migration is a painful theme in her work. US Visa restrictions meant she could not attend the London show. ‘For most of my life I have been involved in this dynamic, and I’m really fed up of it.’ Exhibiting alongside work by Sonia Delaunay was a thrill, as she is a personal heroine. She reminds me that at a very young age Sonia had herself adopted from Ukraine by a wealthy uncle in Russia gaining access to an art education. Later she married her French dealer for access to her dowry. ‘She was often dealing with immigration situations. It was something I related to so strongly. In tricky work situations I often ask: What would Sonia do?’
Image: Primavera,
Sagarika Sundaram. Image courtesy of Sagarika Sundaram
She thinks it’s interesting that during lockdown many in the Western hemisphere experienced travel restrictions for the first time. ‘Half the world lives in this way, all the time.’ Looking back, she can see how her first large-scale work, Oracle (2019), a gorgeous snarly wool rectangle, comprised of individual elements woven together to create an undulating landscape, resembles an ocean floor or a map. ‘It expresses all the tension that I feel and carry. It’s a mirror in a way.’
She’s also been using a 1930s antique toy loom to make small weavings with a modified ikat technique. ‘I’m weaving with felted yarn that I made from scratch by rubbing wool fibre between my palms in hot soapy water.’ As she works, she’ll listen to BBC Radio 6 and Desert Island Discs. ‘Sometimes I even have The Great British Bake Off on TV,’ she laughs. ‘Because when I look at them work, it’s very much the way I work - cutting, slicing, creating a batter.’
In her studio, she layers the bigger pieces on the floor - rolling and wetting fibres so they fuse together. She will have dyed different kinds of wool in different colours, so she has a palette to build with. ‘I often say it’s like cooking in a kitchen.’ The piece is laid face-down and she builds it up in reverse, so it’s like a photographic negative. When she finally flips over the piece to see the design, it’s a genuine moment of surprise. That revelation is what drives her forward. ‘It’s a confrontation with the work itself. There’s so much beauty and joy in that moment. I just want to be able to share that transformation, and see how people respond.’
Find out more about Sagarika's work on her website: www.sagarikasundaram.com
Sagarika Sundaram will be speaking at our upcoming online talk, Wool, on Wednesday 14 December 2022. Book your tickets on our website: www.selvedge.org