In 2020, the textile artist Sagarika Sundaram made her first large-scale work, Oracle. It is an impressive creation of hand-dyed felted wool bursting with rich red, blue, and yellow hues. Every textile work coaxes the hand into a deep and sensual intimacy, but the tactility involved in creating Oracle was altogether overwhelming. After mounting the work, she took a moment to “sit with it” to “talk to it” and in turn to “let it talk to me.” Sundaram was moved by her communion with the work. Here was validation that she is indeed an artist. 

Born in Kolkata, India, Sundaram is an inheritor of vast and extensive South Asian textile traditions. Her work continues to weave the threads of a lineage that reaches across time and geographies while expanding its aesthetic variety. Felt is one of the world’s oldest textile traditions—thousands and thousands of years old—but Sundaram isn’t burdened by this history. Instead it galvanizes her into testing and experimenting with felt’s various properties, working the textile in new forms and arrangements and imbuing it with newer and bolder colors.

In the years since making Oracle, Sundaram has continued to construct large-scale works that evoke the forms and textures of the natural world, ranging from sea creatures to rich, pendulous vegetation. She’s acutely aware of how her work is bound up with and dependent upon nature, whether it’s raw sheep’s wool or natural dyes, and this knowledge shapes her approach to sourcing materials from locales as varied as the Himalayas and the Hudson River Valley.

I imagine Sundaram’s time in Miami was especially congenial to her sensibility given her penchant for natural phenomena and imagery. Waves and rain and palm fronds and wildlife: all these stir the humid atmosphere of South Florida, giving it its distinctive character. These elements surely delighted Sundaram’s eye, and it will be interesting to see how the region’s lush landscape might manifest in her work as it evolves.