Sagarika Sundaram on the Alchemy of Fiber
Sagarika Sundaram. Courtesy of the artist. Credit: Anita Goes.
“It’s just maths,” remarked Sagarika Sundaram during a panel at Art Basel, Miami Beach, alongside Larry Ossei-Mensah and Sarah Zapata, when describing her intricate weaving process. Sundaram’s rise began with her participation in the Silver Art Projects residency in New York in 2022. Soon, her work caught the attention of the prominent India-based gallery Nature Morte. The gallery showcased her at the Armory Show in 2022 and 2023, bringing her into the public eye and earning her a spot in a New York Times round-up. Sundaram has since exhibited at Salon 94, and recently mounted her first solo exhibition in India with Nature Morte in Delhi, coinciding with the 16th edition of the India Art Fair. In this behind-the-scenes glimpse, Sundaram reflects on her journey and initial attraction to the medium of textile.
Shreya Ajmani: What drew you to textile?
Sagarika Sundaram: I’m the kind of person who enjoys unpicking tangled-up strings, idly and with patience. The material feels good between my fingers. It's like solving a puzzle. There’s a lot of that kind of work when it comes to textile. Fiddly and slow at first but then precise and elegant. There’s a base logic to the different ways to make cloth, from which one can extrapolate. My inquiry has led me into the realm of sculpture.
SA: How did you begin working with fiber and textile?
SS: Most people from Southern India have a relationship with handloom fabric because there’s so much of it every day. I am thinking about my mother’s saris and my father’s veshtis. Wearing these garments requires a literacy with pleating and folding cloth. I can picture my grandmother washing her nine-yard sari in our apartment in Chennai. She would fold the cloth precisely, throw it over a clothesline hung high up with a long stick, and use the tool to methodically unfold it out to dry. I was eleven years old and living in Dubai with my parents when I left to study at a residential school in India called Rishi Valley. At school, we swept our floors daily with an Indian-style broom and squatted to mop with a cloth. We washed our clothes, socks, and undergarments on washing stones by hand. I bring all of this work into my artwork. It was at Rishi Valley that I also started to think about textile as artwork.
Sagarika Sundaram, Source (2023). Hand-dyed wool and wire. Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte.
SA: How did your works for this exhibition come to be?
SS: I try to catch pockets of time for experimentation towards no particular end, keeping faith that the necessary connections will reveal themselves at the right time.
SA: What does textile allow you to express that other mediums may not?
SS: Someone asked me in an interview: “How do you feel working with such humble materials?” And I thought: “These are not humble materials! They’re high quality.” They come from sheep and are renewable—they’re like jewels. In my studio I feel like I’m surrounded by rubies and emeralds, treasures from the earth. It’s difficult to make something uninteresting when my starting point is so rich. I like the word terroir—just like wine, wool is informed by the soil the sheep grazes on and the moisture levels. Their habitat gives the wool perfume and flavor.
My network of wool suppliers is constantly shifting and expanding. Each variety of wool has its own texture, which lends itself to a unique “handwriting” in the work. There’s a beauty of working with material from its source. If you’re really paying attention as you work, you naturally wonder how the material came to be in its present state—what it was before, where it is from. Even with dye, what is the chemical formulation? What impact does it have in its afterlife? It is a general sensitivity to the origin of things that one engenders.
There’s something about the way wool fibers melt into each other and interlink that I find offers many plastic possibilities. I am able to shape it in all these ways that are expressive and allow for the creation of a wide artistic vocabulary.
Sagarika Sundaram. Courtesy of the artist and Nature Morte. Credit: Anita Goes.
Sagarika Sundaram will mount a solo exhibition in October 2025 with Alison Jacques during Frieze, London.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
