Sagarika Sundaram

2022 AIM FELLOW

 

Sagarika Sundaram (b. Kolkata) lives and works in New York. In 2022 she was awarded The Hopper Prize, a Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship and a residency at Art Omi. In 2020 she received the Tishman Award for Excellence in Climate, Environmental Justice & Sustainability and the Michael Kalil Endowment for Smart Design. She is Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt. Her work has recently been exhibited at Frestonian Gallery in London alongside works by Sonia Delaunay, Frieze New York (2021, with Jhaveri Contemporary) and Nature Morte, New Delhi. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and at MICA in Baltimore.

 
 
Artist Statement
 
Compressing hand-dyed fiber into dense forms, I create felted tapestries that investigate the materiality of wool and its relationship to human biology and psyche. I treat textile like a body – rupturing the flat surface, revealing what lies beneath layers – the carnal, painful, ugly, beautiful – interrogating what it means to be both of and alien to this world. I cook the wool with natural pigments from roots, rhizomes and leaves. The work reveals its process of labor with gestural strokes and sliced open surfaces. I use abstraction to reinterpret textile as mutant, botanical, and psychedelic forms. By estranging what is familiar, I create work that possesses its own unique life. The process becomes a site for exchange with expert artisans initiating conversations and projects. My material and way of making traces a lineage of makers spanning 15,000 years. Through my work I’m looking for our shared fingerprint.
 
 
Contact Info:

 

Hybrid, Mana Contemporary, NJ (2020)

 

Form/Symbol, Frestonian Gallery, London UK (2022)

Primavera (2022)
76 x 87 x 1 in
Wool, bamboo viscose, botanical dye

 

Swayambhu

74 x 59 x 3 in

Wool, wire

Oracle (2019)
72 x 84 x 4 in
Wool, botanical dye

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