Sagarika Sundaram – interview: ‘The end result is very much a surprise to me’

At her studio in the World Trade Center, as she prepares for a solo show at Alison Jacques Gallery in London later this year, the artist talks about using space, surface and colour in her sculptures

Sagarika Sundaram. Photo: Anita Goes.

by ELIZABETH BUHE

Sagarika Sundaram is an artist who is rapidly gaining global recognition for her sculptures, wall reliefs and room-sized installations made from natural fibres and dyes. Born in 1986 in Kolkata and raised in Dubai, Sundaram deploys colour combinations deeply rooted in personal memory as well as gestures reliant on a felt history of movement recalled from her childhood. Following a major commission by the UBS Art Collection for Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2024 and a solo show at Nature Morte gallery in New Delhi in January and February 2025, the artist is preparing for another solo exhibition at Alison Jacques Gallery in London in October 2025.

Studio International visited Sundaram in her studio on the 28th floor of the new World Trade Center in lower Manhattan.

Elizabeth Buhe: Thank you for inviting me into the studio. It is great to see these large tables where you can work flat, and bags of dyed felt piled along the walls. I would like to start with process, since you essentially build your artworks from behind. You are not entirely able to see what you are building. There is a point at which the initial fibre choices that you have made become buried. How do you move from that point forward? Are you imagining a full composition, or are you making choices based on what you can see developing in the work?

Sagarika Sundaram: I’m holding it in my head and also losing some of it. Some parts of the work I’ll have in my head in higher fidelity, especially if it has to open up. But as I build, I lose sense. The end result is very much a surprise to me. The deviation from my memory, that’s fun.

EB: Is there a concept or philosophy that you endorse in making? I have heard you mention the word “unseeing”. Do you rely on something like that, or has it become simply about your own process?

SS: What I want to keep at the heart of the work is a sense of unselfconsciousness. I can really tell which works I’m open and free and at play in. I love looking at those. When I see anybody doing something and they’re completely at play and free – to me, that is human potential at its peak. That’s what one is striving for. To be suspended in that state of freedom.

Sagarika Sundaram in her studio at the World Trade Center, New York. Photo: Anita Goes.

EB: Are you in that state of play when you are cutting?

SS: It’s a part of it. Sometimes, I decide not to cut based on the whole composition. It’s a good question. Yes, I am, because it’s completely unexpected.

EB: The works that have felt elements that hang down below the whole are interesting because they disrupt the overall composition and address the force of gravity.

SS: Yes, I’m trying to disrupt the harmony of a colour palette. I’m trying to disrupt the flatness. I’m trying to disrupt uprightness. I’m trying to disrupt the edges for myself.

EB: Those disruptions often seem organic, or based on natural forms or processes. You used the term kangaroo pouch, and I do feel like I can somehow bodily identify with those works of yours that have pockets built into their surfaces. It is alive, or welcoming, or harbours the possibility of safety. It is even pregnant.

SS: Yeah, and it feels like something was born from it. It’s also a little creepy, this work [Night Creeper, 2024]. When I finished it and held it up, my mother said that those look like the whites of eyes with the eyeballs rolled back. There’s a sense of ominousness. It’s also something I like to touch. An overly pleasing, harmonious work is a little boring and sleepy for me. I might make one to enjoy it, or if I feel very romantic. I’m looking to squeeze lime on top, just a little bit of acid, and then I’m done.

Sagarika Sundaram. Night Creeper, 2024. Hand-dyed wool, wire, 51 x 91 in (129 x 231 cm). Photo courtesy Nature Morte gallery.

EB: Do you think about human bodies in relation to the work?

SS: When I finish a work, it feels very much like skin. You know, if you touch it, the wire armature inside feels very much like bone. I often refer to parts of a model or work as ribs or spine, membrane, skin. I don’t ever want to set out to do something, I want to let it tell me. The way I’ve started to relate the work to the body is because that’s what it has started to say to me. And that seems also like the history of felt, right? It’s been shelter, it’s been clothes. It has the capacity to be many things at once. It’s very versatile. I love that about it. One thing I connect to the most is the shelter, historically, used in architecture. Felt is used for shoes, laptop sleeves, everything. It’s very strong. That’s very much a part of how I arrive at constructions.

EB: Where do you turn for ideas about architectural space?

SS: I’m reading books on architecture and space. There’s a book by Richard Serra that I’m reading – it’s his collected interviews, basically. I’m comparing his writing with this text from The Sense of Unity: The Sufi Tradition in Persian Architecture by Nader Ardalan and Laleh Bakhtiar. Serra talks about surface and space, and how he doesn’t engage with surface. The second book is amazing and comprehensive like a textbook, about how all traditional Islamic architecture is a metaphor for the concept of the port, gateway, garden and paradise. What is surface doing in these ancient and medieval buildings? Versus someone like Serra, who was thinking about space, surface, problem-solving, and his opinion about it in contemporary art. I’m comparing the two and kind of arriving at my own, or discovering what my own position is.

I’m self-studying, in a way. In his interviews, there’s a passage where Serra talks about Brâncuși’s surfaces and his metal sculptures, gold cubes. That is of no interest to Serra at all. I can’t bring myself to ignore, and don’t think he ignored, surface. The surfaces of his work give you so much. I have to understand more about how he approached that. He is always arriving at the essential, right? But it’s not like the folks in Persia weren’t thinking about that as well. It’s just two different positions. As I built the work for UBS, my question was very much surface. First, I figured out structure, but how do the two relate? Ideally there is no gap between the two questions. They do not even exist separately.

Sagarika Sundaram: Polyphony, installation view, Nature Morte gallery, New Delhi, 17 January 17 – 23 February 2025. Photo courtesy Nature Morte gallery.

EB: Bringing Serra in makes me wonder who your peers are.

SS: It’s rare for me to find somebody I can talk to about space. Maybe I need to meet more sculptors. My friend Ajay Kurian, who I often talk to, is American, but he’s of Indian heritage so we have two different positions that overlap. He’s someone who has read a lot of philosophy and I’m making my own way into those things. I’m not as interested in my art being an exemplification of a philosophical theory. That feels like a secondhand place to start from. My friend, artist Ania Freer works mainly in film and portraiture, she recently made an artist film on me for UBS to accompany the Art Basel Miami commission – she’s extremely perceptive. In her quiet way, she pointed out something that I never really admitted to anyone else, that I work best in short, intense bursts. I also love talking with the curator Andrew Gardner, who wrote an essay in my catalogue. I love the way he manhandles my maquettes, flopping them around, offering new possibilities for the work. One person I found who I can speak to is an 80-year-old artist called Dan Devine, who is on the board of Art Omi. When making the tent work Passage Along the Edge of the Earth (2022) during the residency at Omi, I would say to him: “Hey Dan, I have a drawing and a model. I have a question for you.” And then he would reframe and pose the question back at me. He’s a professor of sculpture at Hofstra University. Maybe it’s an older way of thinking about sculpture, but that’s what I’m drawn to. I didn't have that training and I’m hungry for it, so I’m seeking it out on my own, through books and people.

When I read that book by Serra, I felt I had somebody talk to. He says in a way that the shape of the plates resolved itself because of the interaction between the viewer and the opening they created. When things resolve naturally and inevitably, I like that. What it feels like for me right now is that there’s a field of questions that are generative, and lead to other questions. Definitely, it’s about space and surface and colour and openings and entryways and scale. And freedom.

EB: In interviews you have done before, you mention remembering your grandmother hanging something over a line, or you have a felt memory of tying saris. To what extent does the felt memory of movement inform your making? Motions that become less conscious, as you have said, because of repetition?

SS: It’s interesting to me when Richard Serra talks about being in school. It’s true, it comes from watching my mother, my father, my grandmother, my grandfather. Is it a textile thing, or a craft thing, or a woman thing, where the biography is so important? Relative to my own work, the role of biography is on my mind. How do writers bring in where I’m from and all that culturally specific stuff without it being like, namaste, you know? I really would love to talk about what the work is doing. I love to read a writer’s view on that. That’s interesting for me versus their view on me.

Serra talks about being a part-time worker when he was in college, at factories where they were working with steel. That’s how he learned the ABCs, and he approached understanding it from the ground up. Which is in a way how, when I was understanding fibre, I was doing the same thing. Nobody focuses on his grandmother and grandfather, but I do. For instance. I read that [Robert] Rauschenberg's grandparents were Christian fundamentalists. And he incorrectly claimed that his grandmother was Cherokee. And I just wonder what the implications are, but what do you call this gesture? Pinching? I don't know. Laying? Throwing? Cross-hatching? Rubbing? Picking? Pulling?

Sagarika Sundaram: Polyphony, installation view, Nature Morte gallery, New Delhi, 17 January 17 – 23 February 2025. Photo courtesy Nature Morte gallery.

EB: In 1967, Serra made a verb list.

SS: Exactly, yeah. I have a verb list as well. His verb list gives so much, right? There’s also the paper models. Creasing, pressing, stapling. I love the stapler. It shows you gravity versus non gravity. The paper has its own structure where it opens, but then I sometimes recreate in fabric to see how cloth will softly do its thing.

EB: This makes me think of Hannah Wilke and Lynda Benglis. Do you have investments in those figures?

SS: I would say I’ve studied Lynda Benglis more closely. Peter Nagy mentioned her in his essay for my first catalogue, Source. I’ve loved her work. Also, she lives partly in Ahmedabad in India, where I studied as an undergraduate. Hannah Wilke is in Alison Jacques’ stable, so now I’m looking at her work more deeply. Robert Morris is interesting to me because he also cut. There are so many actions that go into my work. For the wet felting, it’s rolling, tying, bundling, kicking, wetting, soaking, pressing. There’s dyeing, stirring, dripping and pouring. And then there’s the compositional work, which is throwing, laying, pinching, twisting, knotting. In a way, it’s like collage – collaging tufts and smashing them together, finding interactions, finding relationships.

Sagarika Sundaram. Four Pockets, 2024. Hand dyed wool, wire, 63 x 132 x 19 in (160 x 335.3 x 48.3 cm). Photo courtesy Nature Morte gallery.

EB: How does your process of making require you to use your body?

SS: That work rolled up over there in the corridor, I finished the day before yesterday. That’s ready to be felted. Last night I was here till 11, standing on these tables, laying it out.

EB: What are the different spaces you work in at the New York studios, and what do you do at each one?

SS: Right now, there’s this main studio that we are in, that is the central hub of the work. It’s where I compose pieces, mix colour, hang work, make my paper models, make sketches. My thinking work, really. Then there’s my home studio. I make my colour in a bathroom there. I have set up a dye lab. Then the third space – ideally all of this would happen in one space – the third space is where the wet felting happens. As I’ve done more of it, I’ve realised I can be pretty nomadic about where my work happens.

I just need hot water, soap and a space that can get relatively wet. Upstate, when I was showing at the Al Held Foundation, I made a piece at Jennifer Zackin’s studio. She had underfloor heating, which was wonderful because the water dried up very quickly. That’s what I also need, a studio with underfloor heating. I have felted in my mother’s living room. I just clear the sofas and set up towels and bed sheets as barriers for the water. I’ve felted in rural India. It makes sense that I can do that, because it is a technique that was practised by pastoral nomadic people. It’s very quick.

Detail view of Sagarika Sundaram's studio. Photo: Elizabeth Buhe.

EB: How do you develop colour? 

SS: It’s taken me a while to get to a place where I have some sort of clarity. At first it was just not even what colour, it was make colour. You know, whatever colour I was able to make, whatever dye stuff I was able to get, that determined the colour that was in the work. It took time to evolve my capabilities to figure out what kind of dyes I like, and why. And then when I found that, I had to make a colour chart, as a baseline. To understand which colour does what and at what percentage at 0.1 saturation or 0.5 saturation, how does it look?

You pick one formulation as a baseline and then and I say, OK, let’s build from there to develop a reddish-green or a bluish-grey or a bluish-green. It’s like baking. You can’t run a bakery if you don’t know how to bake. You need to understand the basics. Flour and butter at what temperature; the basic chemistry of how protein fibre, which is what wool is, interacts with acid dye. Once you know the basics, we can have conversations about colour.

Detail view of Sagarika Sundaram's studio. Photo: Elizabeth Buhe.

EB: In your colour chart, as you research all the dyes you can buy, are you also concerned with the history of the dye – the historical dimension of trade and commerce?

SS: I was working in London when I studied indigo dyeing. My first indigo teacher was in Cornwall in 2016. She gave me her book on indigo dyeing. She shouted at me in front of everyone when I did it wrong and I cried. This is how I first was introduced to indigo dyeing. There’s a lot of historical stuff in here and in the other books that I use to teach. I first learned to work with natural dyes, these are more challenging to work with than synthetics.

I really dug into the history and the colonial history. Some of the best indigo is grown and processed where I come from in India, in Tamil Nadu. So, you know, I feel more invested in understanding it. I’m drawn to the historical side of it, but also the chemistry side. Textiles becomes a place where I’ve been able to gather all my interests in chemistry, in architecture, things that I couldn’t really pursue, or didn’t feel like I wanted to go into deeply as subjects on their own.

Dyes behave differently based on whether you apply them on textiles that come from a plant-based source of fibre or an animal-based source. My favourite exercise is this one, which is how to use one material to get 25 different shades of colour. Whether you use an iron, copper, alum or rhubarb modifier, pre and post the dyeing, you can shift the colour value based on pH.

Right now, the way I approach colour is that there are no rules, nothing really does not go together. Maybe it’s slightly romantic. I think that, if I look at nature for inspiration, there’s really no combination that you don’t find. I don’t feel I should be beholden to any rules. I don’t think anything doesn’t fit together, it’s only how you treat things. That’s my philosophy for colour.

Colour in fibre is very different to colour on paper and pigments. This is a good example [in the book Color Works: The Crafter’s Guide to Color by Deb Menz]. It shows one hue in different colour values and across different media. It shows swatches of cloth in beading, embroidery, knitting, weaving. Look at the swatch which has the base hue with a little bit of the complement in the yarn fibre. So, a little bit of green in the red actually makes it pop more. This is the space that I’m in right now: understanding colour and fibre. Because it’s very specific to the medium, there are parallels but it does not behave the same way as it behaves when you think about paint.

EB: When you're conceiving of a work, is it colour that’s guiding you, or an idea for a composition? I see something that looks like a sketch here. What’s your process?

SS: This is a work for UBS at Art Basel, Miami. Basically, it hangs from above and it opens from itself. I made a whole lot of models to work out the form. I’ve been working to understand different variations structurally, and how it can hang in space. What is the work going to do on one side versus the other?

Form and colour work together. I have to mix a whole lot of colour and have it all laid out in front of me for me to work out how the two relate. I have a tendency to use all the colours in front of me.

I do love this maroon and yellow combination. It reminds me of the colour of a flower that I used to find very ugly when I was growing up. It’s a flower I remember seeing in Tamil movies from the 1980s. When the hero and the heroine would kiss, they would cut to flowers in gardens, because kissing was censored. There were these ugly Technicolor flowers. I was like, yuck. But now that’s what I look for, something incongruous that gives me some kind of energy that vibrates and hums. Some sort of feedback.

Sagarika Sundaram. Mother of Pearl, 2024. Hand-dyed wool, wire 76 x 58 x 26 in (193 x 148 x 66 cm). Photo courtesy Nature Morte gallery.

EB: Once you feel you’ve hit on something that has energy, where do you go from there? 

SS: I have line and I have ground. I use some fibre to give me a sharp edge. Others give me gradients. Sometimes, if it’s tonal, like those pink ones over there, it’s just tonal, it disappears into the background at the bottom. I might pick some pink and yellow in the line, or some white, and create. I’ll give myself cardinals or anchors, compositionally.

The surface, the way the fibres interact, have to produce a cloth that feels like quality. I’m bringing out the essence of the fibre. It’s so beautiful for me, this raw material. It glows in the light. I have to use what it’s giving me. I like my cloth to look like a burnished jewel or metal. I love the surface to feel rich. Even if it’s muted.

EB: When and how do you begin making decisions about colour combinations?

SS: Right now, with colour it’s all from my head. I’m waiting to have enough space to properly keep and store my mom’s saris where I can more actively reference them. I come from a part of India where there’s a sari called the Kanjivaram sari, and the colour combinations in saris that are woven there have a specific weave structure. I love breaking down the colour combinations of these saris because they’re so unusual and brave, especially in older saris. They might put that maroon and chrome yellow, with a greyish blue and a deep purple. Which has me wondering, how did they think of this?

Sagarika Sundaram in her studio at the World Trade Center, New York. Photo: Anita Goes.

EB: Speaking about saris makes me curious about your history with design. What kind of proposal is your work? Is it a proposal for living? A kind of ecology?

SS: It’s a commitment to the non-utilitarian. I had to unlearn a lot of my design training and taking pride in something being useful. There’s no reason that these works shouldn’t exist at all. But I think that’s art. They do seem to be more than just aesthetic propositions, right?

I do want it to feel like a zone where people can … maybe it’ll shift sound. It will feel intimate. I hope people can walk through and have that sense of excitement of what it feels to breathe. To break an artwork, in a way, to break the frame of an artwork. What is allowed, not allowed to touch? You’re never allowed to walk through art. I think it’s exciting to do those things.

EB: In that way, it feels like a proposal for reconfiguring our relationship with an object.

SS: I suppose, yeah. I want to cut open the surfaces. Sometimes people say: “Oh my God, how can you cut it in the middle?”

EB: The fact that you have done that seems to also give us some kind of permission.

SS: Yeah, I suppose so. Maybe it’s about permission, a proposal for permission. I don't know if that’s a sensible statement. That’s something to think about. I like this idea of it being a proposal for reconfiguring. But reconfiguring what?