Sagarika Sundaram (b. 1986, Kolkata, India) creates sculpture, relief works and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, and a Senior Fellow at Silver Art Projects in New York City. Drawing extensively on natural imagery, the work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural and the interior from the exterior, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality. In 2023, Sundaram exhibited at the Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, the British Textile Biennial and Chicago Architecture Biennial. In 2024 she will participate in Bronx Calling: The Seventh AIM Biennial at The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Sundaram’s work has been presented at The Armory Show in New York (2022, 2023) and at Frieze London 2023 with Nature Morte Gallery. 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. Her work has been reviewed by the New York Times and ARTnews, while her practice has been featured on PBS, Artnet News, and the cover of Fiber Art Now Journal.
Sundaram creates felted tapestries that investigate the materiality of wool and its relationship to human biology and psyche. She treats textile like a body –rupturing the flat surface, revealing what lies beneath layers – the sexual, painful, ugly, beautiful – interrogating what it means to be both of, and alien to this world. She uses abstraction to reinterpret textile as mutant, botanical, and psychedelic forms. By estranging what is familiar, Sundaram creates work that possesses its own unique life.