Sagarika Sundaram: Taking Wool Seriously

When I meet Sagarika Sundaram, she’s wearing all red, including a pair of Puma shoes recently purchased in Europe that she says are unavailable in New York, where she’s lived for the past eight years. Her attention to colour extends beyond the studio.

Reservoir, which opened at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds on 30 September, is the artist’s first solo museum exhibition and brings together an entirely new body of work made for the exhibition. She makes her sculptures by dyeing, layering and compressing loose wool into felt, then cutting into it to reveal colours and forms concealed within. To produce the works for Reservoir, Sundaram spent the past six months in Kutch, a region of Gujarat in western India with a rich textile and craft tradition.

Sundaram arrived with romantic notions of collaborating with local artisans but became so absorbed in her work that she had little time to be a tourist. It took her months to visit the nearest village, a ten-minute walk away. But the rural location and the space it afforded allowed her to work on a large scale without sacrificing technical complexity. It was, she says, “the first time I’ve done that”.

The scale of her work and the resulting logistics can get “quite ridiculous”, she admits. In New York, she once carried a 3m-long rolled-up work on the subway, laying it across the seats and carrying it out on her shoulders. At the warehouse where she was working in Kutch, she had to hire a crane to help unfurl an early iteration of Dancer (2026) from a 9m-high ceiling. The work serves as the backdrop for our conversation.

Artist Sagarika Sundaram stands with her work Dancer 2026 in her exhibition Reservoir at Henry Moore Institute. Courtesy the artist, Henry Moore Institute and Alison Jacques, London Photo: Rob Harris.

Dancer, extending from floor to ceiling in a series of spirals and arguably the strongest piece in the exhibition, was born of Sundaram’s attraction to the spiral form. “The spiral is a shape you see in nature: in shells, in orange peels, but it’s also a form that exists inside our body.” She finds it inspiring when geometries from nature recur across cultures because it makes the symbol feel “fundamental to who we are”.

As I walk past, the sculpture moves ever so slightly – spinning one way, then turning another. Sundaram has made the deliberate choice to keep a few fraying threads near the bottom of the piece as evidence of how it was made.

Sundaram has been working with wool for around a decade. She was drawn to the material because of the directness of working with it: when she’s creating, there’s nothing between the fabric and her hands. “The body-mind connection becomes so strong it almost bypasses my brain,” she says. “When I look at the work, I see my hand. I see my soul in a way, as if a part of myself is living in the fabric.”

The labour-intensive process of making felt has brought together a community of people who have assisted Sundaram, from Kutch to New York. “All of them are now connected and feel part of the work,” she says. Yet when I offer up the idea that the work makes a strong statement about the power of the collective, Sundaram is quick to reject it.

Acknowledging that no work is made alone, she nevertheless insists on her authorship, questioning why collaboration should cast doubt on a woman’s artistic ownership. “Nobody asks male artists such as Jeff Koons or Anish Kapoor whether they couldn’t do it on their own,” she says.

Sagarika Sundaram Detail from Dancer 2026 Dyed wool, steel Courtesy the artist, Henry Moore Institute and Alison Jacques, London Photo: Rob Harris.

And while she hopes creativity always finds a place in the lives of her assistants in Kutch, she’s realistic about the circumstances that led to their collaboration:“It’s not like they did this work because it was fun: they needed the money.”

Beyond the craft and labour, Sundaram wants the pieces to be seen – and appreciated – as sculptures. As if to illustrate her point, she leads me to Rope (2026), a structure of loose wool handfelted into individual lengths of string before being twisted and entwined.

Though made from felt rather than woven cloth, Rope is Sundaram’s abstraction of khadi, the handspun, handwoven fabric that became a powerful symbol of India’s independence movement. Britain had imposed tariffs on fabrics in India, while cheap fabric from mills in Lancashire and Yorkshire flooded the Indian market, undermining India’s textile industry. In response, M.K. Gandhi promoted khadi, encouraging people to make their own cloth and learn how to spin. “I’m drawn to that spirit of self-reliance and resourcefulness,” Sundaram says. That the work is on show in Yorkshire is not lost on me.

Sagarika Sundaram Rope 2026 Dyed wool Courtesy the artist, Henry Moore Institute and Alison Jacques, London Photo: Rob Harris.

Sundaram believes “all work is political”. Yet she would like hers to remain open so people can find their own meaning in it. Like Dancer, Rope gestures to its construction through the loose fraying string at its ends. Such “Easter eggs”, as Sundaram refers to them, allow viewers to peer into the making of the sculptures.

Feltmaking is a pastoral, nomadic way of working that goes back 15,000 years, she claims (a British Museum educational resource dates early evidence of its use to 6500 BC, approximately 8,500 years ago). “At a time when much of the world is reinforcing how we are separate or different from each other, these recurring symbols and these ways of working are evidence we are connected.”