Sagarika Sundaram’s gigantic sculptures may look like aliens but they’re colourful and friendly
In its spacious and bright studio at Silver Art Projects, New York, Sunday goes to the top of one of its large -scale compositions extended through a table. Barefoot, she assesses it with a measured approach. She then lowers her hips and tears the fiber in vaporous tufts, superimposing them on each other with a targeted flair – a repetitive, almost meditative act. This is how she “builds” her art.
Born in Kolkata, the childhood memories of Sunday are impregnated with moments of gaze of his grandmother to fold a sari in two and to hang him to dry on the clothes rope, or his father attaches his vehicles to the house. At 11, when she was a student at Rishi Valley School in Andhra Pradesh, Sunday experienced textiles for the first time, producing works by Batik who captured her imagination. It was two decades later, in 2017, that she first made a felt orb in the size of a palm in London. Intrigued by the interior of the sphere, she cleaned it with a knife, revealing rings nested with colorful leaves. “Opening it, seemed to discover a secret inside,” explains the artist. Today, as an almost ritualist act, she continues to open the folds of her cozy canvases to reveal their hidden complexities.
