Sometimes, artwork defies definition and will be described in myriad methods, stretching a medium’s limits and carrying its historical past whereas remodeling into one thing singular. Sagarika Sundaram innovates with fiber, molding it to heights and shapes beforehand unrealized, absorbing affect from all genres of artwork. You’ll wish to put your palms on the work, nevertheless it would possibly contact you first.
Kristin Farr: How do the kinds and supplies of your work relate to the physique?
Sagarika Sundaram: The material is fleshy, usually reduce open like a membrane, a wound folded open, revealing a kind hidden inside a kind. I’m within the psychological rigidity between inside and out of doors, floor and construction. Concentric rings, spirals, and a hybrid flower-womb-maw recur as summary gestures, recalling botany but additionally human biology, providing multivalent interpretations round delivery, progress and nonlinear notions of time. On the coronary heart of my work is an consideration to the artistic precept.
When did you begin working in fiber? Inform us about your supplies and dyeing course of.
I studied batik, wax portray on material, in India between the ages of 11 and 18. The handwriting I uncovered throughout this era carries via within the summary constructions I at present create. I purchase fiber primarily from the decrease Himalayan area, Upstate New York and Oaxaca. My community of wool suppliers is continually shifting and increasing. Every number of wool has its personal texture, which gives a novel character to the work.
I hand-dye the fiber, drawing from a deep understanding of the physics of fiber and the chemistry of coloration. I lay wool down like I’m sketching—cross-hatching and overlapping strands to kind a mesh, a powerful, related membrane. The fiber is then subtle with heat, soapy water after which rolled backwards and forwards till it enmeshes right into a material.
Speak concerning the cultural and historic significance of felt and the way that resonates for you.
One of many issues that I’m at all times so drawn to with textile tradition is that it’s a shared medium, nearly universally, around the globe. Throughout Central Asia, the Silk Highway, China, Turkey, India, and Iraq—the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of civilization—wherever there’s sheep, there’s felt. I consider felt like a connective tissue, or fascia. The phrase for felt in Iran is namad; in Gujarat and Kashmir, they name it namda. I like discovering connections like these which can be separate and simultaneous. It’s proof for me that people assume in patterns throughout time and geographies.
Why is working giant essential to your communication?
Smaller works arrive as sketches for bigger ones. The thought transforms considerably when it scales up right into a full-sized work and gives an enviornment to generate rigidity and depth. Once I make giant works, I’ve room to play—as a result of it’s an area so large that it’s past my management. It forces me to step into a spot of threat and un-self-consciousness. A specialist in up to date Chinese language artwork informed me that the measure of an paintings’s success relies on whether or not the artist was at play. For the time being, I discover that I want house to be at play.
Which elements of nature encourage you most?
I can spend a very long time taking a look at undersea creatures, neon and iridescent bugs, and carnivorous flowers—elements of nature that really feel mutant however are very a lot a part of the material of life. They make me query our definition of the norm and what we think about as being of this world versus what we consider as alien to it. I’m occupied with kinds that speak in confidence to reveal a complete new inside world, like rock crystals and even some varieties or fruit. I discover that relationship between the inside from the outside fascinating and indicative of the intertwined nature of actuality.
Inform me about different mediums you’ve labored in.
The work I make proper now’s an evolution of years of labor in different kinds and media. I used to be making handmade books, printed books, stop-motion animation, short-films, working with typography, and calligraphy. I labored in know-how, design, and technique. In some unspecified time in the future down the road, I wished to give attention to textiles, with a powerful understanding of what I used to be doing. It took me fifteen years to refine my present set of expertise: felt-making, dyeing, weaving, printing, embroidery, crochet, knitting, and so forth. I discovered that if I simply paid shut consideration to the mechanics of yarn and understood the “why” behind issues, I’d always remember, however I’d additionally have the ability to choose up something new. As an artist, you actually simply want a place to begin to dive into.
What’s the stage of probability in your course of?
The work is the end result of a sequence of calculations, actual and approximate, that come collectively as one. The textile is constructed backward, just like glass portray. Some sorts of fiber give me line, others give me floor, some take up or replicate gentle, and I’m layering one over the opposite to kind rhythms and relationships, all of the whereas making an attempt to interrupt the formation of anyone sample in order that on the finish, visually, there is no such thing as a starting or finish. The attention has to maintain transferring. At this stage, it’s essential to work in a state the place I really feel current and related to the work. Once I’m involved with breaking the floor of the work, that’s once I’m extra exact, incorporating layers and folds. I transfer to paper fashions to determine structural relationships and the way gravity will have an effect on the best way the fold cuts away and hangs. That mentioned, I’ve approached this a part of the work organically too. So there is no such thing as a a method ahead, however relatively a sequence of pathways that one can elect, combine, and match. With every work, I develop new pathways. I had just one shot once I reduce the felted work open. It is terribly thrilling, my coronary heart is in my mouth at this level. However to date, it has at all times labored out.
Inform me about your studio.
For the previous yr and a half, I’ve labored out of a residency house, Silver Artwork Tasks, in 4 World Commerce Middle. I name my studio “the nook workplace.” With large home windows that look out onto the Hudson River, it’s as if I can step out into the sky. I’ve a mattress within the nook, which is my studying nook. I can see the Statue of Liberty, 1 World Commerce and immediately into the 2 rectangular swimming pools which can be the 9/11 memorial. Technicolor sunsets wash over the massive house. Having this house has enabled me to develop my imaginative and prescient for the work.
You have been commissioned to write down concerning the designer, Issey Miyake. Inform me about your curiosity in his work.
I really feel a connection to Issey Miyake’s APOC, or “A Piece of Fabric,” attire idea that he launched in 1997. You needed to reduce out a ready-made garment from a sample from a roll, a bit like a pop-up e book. I’m creating an analogous method to creating dimensional artworks. Each APOC’s and my method have hyperlinks to origami, which I used to apply with my father as a toddler.
I’m drawn to Issey Miyake’s deep engagement with Indian textiles. Issey made many journeys to India within the ’80s together with his artistic director, Makiko Minagawa, below the steering of their buddy and long-time collaborator, Martand Singh, an essential determine in Indian textiles. They created easy however luxurious materials in step with Issey’s aesthetics that might solely be produced in India, given its staggering textile heritage.
Are you able to share how your mom’s sari assortment impressed you?
My expertise with pleated and folded material has had a powerful affect on my work. The paper fashions that I recreate in cloth assist unlock how gravity impacts the folded floor of the work when it breaks open. As I write this, I’m eager about my mom’s saris and my father’s veshtis that they wore at house. Sporting these clothes requires literacy in pleating and folding material. I bear in mind my grandmother washing her nine-yard sari in our condominium in Madras, India. She would fold the material exactly, throw it over a excessive clothesline with an extended stick, and use the device to methodically unfold it out to dry. I carry all of this hand-work into my paintings.
Inform me a couple of current residency.
Folks at all times wish to contact the work and are by no means fairly positive if that’s allowed. At Artwork Omi, I created Passage Alongside the Fringe of the Earth in 2022, providing an invite to be bodily touched by the work by strolling via it. The work is a big hanging wool tent that opens like a delicate e book. Both sides is marked with archway kinds in brown or indigo blue. A protracted slit runs down these recommended doorways. At about 11 ft excessive and 12 ft large, the construction engulfs the viewer.
I’ve been eager about the connection between structure and the physique. Particularly, I’m eager about domed constructions present in sacred structure throughout Asia, the place the customized is to stroll in circles across the dome in prayer. The impact of this circumambulation creates a type of inside motion that factors to the facility of structure. On the finish of Artwork Omi open studios, I noticed dusty footprints kind a circle on the ground between the 2 doorways within the tent. So, in my eyes, the work succeeded.
Sagarika Sundaram has a solo present opening in February, 2025 in Delhi, and you will discover her work at The Armory and Frieze London artwork gala’s this fall. This interview was initially printed in our SUMMER 2024 Quarterly.