‘Release’ alludes to the idea of transformation in Sundaram’s practice. Shaping wool into felted textile, she follows a methodical process of dyeing, tearing, and compressing raw fibre. Born out of an internal logic that explores ideas of containment and emergence, Sundaram’s works burst open, releasing embedded pockets that are cut to reveal hidden forms within.

Her experimentation with textiles began at age 11, when Sundaram was a student in Andhra Pradesh, India, using batik – a wax-resist technique. Two decades later, while living in London, she made her first felt work, cutting it open with a knife, later describing this process: ‘it felt like discovering a secret inside’.

The exhibition showcases new avenues of expression, including the exploration of glass to create wall-based sculpture. A constant throughout Sundaram’s practice is her fascination with colour, as she describes: ‘there’s an alchemy to it’.

This colourful ‘alchemy’ is both precise and playful, as she told Vogue India, ‘a true test of a dyer is not whether you can make colour, but if you can make the same colour twice.’ Immersing her composition in water, Sundaram manipulates the fibre, fusing it into cloth. ‘By the time things are humming along, the ending makes itself obvious… the work is complete when I can feel it talking to me.’

Across the exhibition, works reference the mandala: a holistic concept integrating the body with itself, grounded in a flat geometric design and structured around one central point. In its multidimensional activation through space – from wall relief to suspended spatial form – Sundaram breaks open this archetypical symbol. Nuanced in colour and complex in construction, Sundaram sculpts space as well as material. Her work activates its environment, choreographing the dynamic between inside and outside, viewer and space. ‘I develop new pathways… it is always a discovery’.

Sundaram was born in Kolkata into a Tamil family and spent much of her childhood between India and Dubai, and now lives and works in New York. In 2020, a decade after her studies at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Sundaram graduated with an MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. She has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, New York; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, Texas; British Textile Biennial, Lancashire, UK and the Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2022 she was awarded The Hopper Prize.

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