Studio Visit: Textile Artist Sagarika Sundaram on Working in Silence and Seeking Out Felts From Around the Globe
Noor Brara, artnet
February 2021
A first impulse when viewing textile artist Sagarika Sundaram’s works is to want to get close to them, to put your hands all over their varied textures comprised of natural fibers sourced from small farms and growers around the world, including India, Uruguay, and New Zealand. You want to envelop yourself in their thick, tactile fabrics; to disappear into a kind of cocoon.
Sundaram is used to inspiring such reactions. In fact, she says, she likes working on pieces that allow viewers a little quiet space, letting them experience the quality of silence you find when swathed in different kinds of materials.
The on-the-rise artist, who showed her works in a group show at Mana Contemporary last October, spent her early life bouncing back and forth between India and Dubai, during which time she’d gaze out the windows of planes, studying land formations in all their varying colors and shapes. Today, the images of those landscapes inspire her to create her own fabrics, which she produces by hand, on occasion working with a felt-making community in the lower Himalayas to gather regionally specific raw materials to fuse together textiles that suggest natural bodies like rivers, mountains, and valleys.
Recently, Sundaram, who was featured on PBS’s Rising Artists program last fall and was recently shortlisted for the UC Berkeley South Asia Art Prize, spoke to Artnet about her process, her studio dosas, the stack of books on her nightstand, and more. […]