London
Walking among the works in Sagarika Sundaram’s recent exhibition “Release,” it was easy to feel like you were being pulled into their space. One piece was suspended below a skylight, while another hung in the center of the room. Wall-based works projected outward, activating the space around them while seeming to reach out as if to meet and touch passing bodies. Employing spiral and mandala motifs, as well as cuts, folds, and layering, these primarily fiber works, which the artist calls “painterly sculpture,” contain a dynamic energy that induces a feeling of flow and movement, experienced as a kind of heady dizziness.
Sundaram sources raw wool from ethical sources, including sheep from upstate New York and the Himalayas. She felts and dyes the wool by hand in her New York studio, with the felting process binding the material together without stitching. Working on one side of an object then on the other, layers accumulate and allow for cutting, which facilitates folding and open pockets of space that reveal hidden interior forms.
Though much of Sundaram’s personal history is bound up in her work, that background doesn’t surface in terms of direct influence; instead, it lends a sensibility or aura that resonates through each piece. Her interest in textiles began when she was a child learning Indonesian batik at the progressive Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, India. The fold, a central tenet in her practice, gestures to learning origami from her father, watching her grandmother carefully folding and unfolding nine-yard saris, and making books at design school.
With the fold comes the cut, and with the cut comes the pocket and an exploration of interior and exterior space. The central fold of the book form appears in works such as Mirror and Undercurrent. Elsewhere, in Release and Star, central cuts and folds create forms that suggest a degree of violence at odds with the softness of fabric. In new developments, Sundaram’s Italian glass mosaic In and Within echoes the same cuts, folds, and slashes as her felt works. Flame of the Forest (mosaic) picks up the mandala motif, also seen in Veil—a double-sided tapestry that drops down into space. Designed to be viewed in the round, Veil entices the body into and around its form. Sundaram explains its associations with temple architecture and the stupa, a central architectural point that guides movement.
Sundaram created Point of View (2024), which hangs from the ceiling by its corners, with the site in mind. A hole in the fabric allows light from the skylight above to pour through, a metaphor for awareness and openness. Through the ecology of her raw materials and the felting process, Sundaram poses questions of nature and history, but her processes of layering, cutting, and releasing raise much deeper questions of how human emotion and personal histories can be liberated, then shared and experienced collectively, contributing to the ongoing project of a common humanity.
