“Suddenly, he was alive!” Sagarika Sundaram, Wild and Explosive Textile Artist | art

WWhen I met Sagarika Sundaram at Alison Jacques Gallery in London, she was in the middle of installing her exhibition. Squares of colorful, hand-dyed fabric are laid flat on the floor like quilts. But next week, when her solo exhibition opens, the works will look very different: bold patterns and textures will seep out of the buried layers she variously refers to as “tongues,” “pockets,” and “guides.” A single piece of felt will be cut, folded at the corner, unfolded and hung from the ceiling like a canopy.

Once hung in this way, Sundaram’s textiles transform into monumental, tangible sculptures. Some stretch 30 feet wide, others support themselves like tents. “I describe them as flowering on their own, these layered things,” the New York-based artist tells me, as she takes off her shoes to climb atop one and peel away hidden folds. “When it opens up, then something activates for me…and suddenly it becomes alive.”

The cutting is the final stage in a labor-intensive process, which often takes Sundaram up to six weeks to complete. She begins by making paper models and huge vats of dye, before hand-pressing the colored wool into felt. After you carefully tape the layers of fabric together, you soak them and leave them to dry overnight.

In a way, it works in reverse: the final layer becomes the front of the sculpture. Sometimes, after several weeks of making, you forget what those initial surfaces look like, or how they all relate to each other when carved open. “It’s like pulling a rabbit out of the hat,” she says with a smile. “I have a lot of fun doing my job.”

Sundaram’s upcoming show is her third solo show and her first in the UK. Titled the release, she sees it as a synthesis of her practice over the past five years and her evolving influences, which include temple architecture, dance and mandalas. Several pieces were moved around earlier this week and have not yet been cut. It’s something you’ll do privately in the days leading up to the show.

Even after five years of doing this kind of work, I ask her: Have you ever been afraid to break something you spent a long time building? Sometimes, she says, the thrill overrides any doubts she might have. “I think there’s something really transgressive about cutting fabric that I put so much effort into,” she told me. “This risk is exciting.”

Growing up between India, where she went to boarding school, and her family’s home in Dubai, Sangaram’s first encounters with art were outside the gallery. She remembers the “art” she found “in everyday life”: making kaleidoscopes from her mother’s broken bracelets, and watching her grandparents take pride in meticulously chopping vegetables. She was introduced to textiles at school and went on to study graphic design at university, before specializing in fabric training and dyeing, but she considers her childhood interactions and observations to be formative for her practice. For example, watching her grandmother handle her saris still resonates. “I think about how elegantly and meticulously she uses a stick to fold her sari,” she says. “First, she would wash it — nine yards of fabric — then put it on the clothesline and unfold it meticulously.” “It’s taking a flat plane and giving it volume with one piece of fabric… I think the way I approach fabric comes from watching all of that, you know?”

Another early influence was her father’s origami lessons: “I grew up around paper folding, understanding paper beads, creasing, cutting. And I think a lot of that shows up in the work as well, because you can think of these things as paper.”

Sundaram often talks about her work in this interdisciplinary way: she describes her actions as drawing and painting; They resemble washed-out pigment spots in watercolor and jagged cross marks in charcoal. She also compares dye making to cooking: both are sensitive to temperature and how you handle your materials, she says. “You have to be able to solve problems, go up and down the process chain and say: Why didn’t this work? Well, maybe that’s where it happened, and try again.” Accordingly, her works resist easy classification. “They are in between things,” she says.

Although Sundaram is a rising name in the art world – she will be exhibiting next year at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds – her style still has a primal energy. She has moved studios five times this year, and continues to make dyes from her bathroom at home, which has been almost completely repurposed as a laboratory. Despite her meticulous knowledge of color and texture, and the meticulous planning behind each of her structures, experimentation seems to be an essential part of her practice. Recent endeavors include playing with less saturated colors, opacity, and web-like shapes, as well as mosaics—details of her felt works blown and reproduced in glass—all of which will be on display in this exhibition. She feels as if she is just getting started.

Last week, before flying out of New York, she set herself a challenge: create a new work every day, between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. “It was really exciting, fun and new,” she says. “When I’m moving fast, there’s no time to think, it goes straight through my hands. I’m about to get lost, and I like that.”

This intuition would also guide the final fabric cuts she would have to make before the show opened. “I’m excited, and I’m scared, but I think this is the right decision,” she says, holding one of the unfinished works. “Once I cut it down, I’ll never remember it the way it was, you know? But it has to be done.”