On Migration, Tradition, and Psychedelic Interiority: In Conversation with Sagarika Sundaram

Sagarika Sundaram is an artist and designer based in New York City. She recently presented her project The Unseers at Mana Contemporary—an exploration of psychedelic vision and embodiment through felting technique and sustainable processes. I Zoomed into her home studio to chat with her about how migration, mythology, and quiet interiority inform her practice, and learn how the confluences of art, design, and anthropology fuel her collaborative approach to making.

Sagarika Sundaram with Oracle (2019). Photo by Denisse Ariana Pérez

Sagarika Sundaram with Oracle (2019). Photo by Iñaki Vildomat

Can you tell me about your geographic journey to get to your current location?

Sometimes I say taking a flight now is like taking a bus. There’s no sensation of the distance between places. I mean, even with Whatsapp you just feel like, in a way I’m almost exactly on the other side of the earth. But actually, physically, to get here? It took me a long time. I actually thought I would never live in New York, because it's just so urban and so man-made and so made-for-man, I never thought I would choose to live in a place like this. I was born in Kolkata. My parents moved from there to Bombay, then moved to Dubai. My grandparents had moved to Calcutta from Tamil Nadu; my other grandparents moved to Ranchi. So you could say I’m a third-generation migrant—there’s been that rhythm of migration in my family for three generations now. I grew up in a boarding school in Rishi Valley, which was in a rural part of India that was a protected natural environment. So I had these two places: urban Dubai and rural Rishi Valley. I’ve lived across Asia, the Middle East; I worked in South Africa, Europe. I was able to move around because it’s easier to get visas from Dubai. This is my third time living in America.

So, when you describe your geographic identity, what words do you use?Another way that you can interpret this is: do you think that there is somewhere you are from?

Really depends on who I’m talking to, and how much capacity they have, or what the moment offers. I mean, the place that I spent my childhood in, I need a visa to go there. I can’t just show up there—I need legal permission to enter again. We never fooled ourselves that we had any rights. My dad worked there for 30 years and after retiring, he had one month to pack up his stuff and leave Dubai. There’s a bittersweet sentimentality because I grew nothing. There are no roots.

When my parents moved back to India, that was the first time I felt like I had a home in Bangalore—and I didn’t even grow up there. I don’t know the streets. I mean now I’ve lived there all of two years, but it feels more like home than anywhere else. I don’t have to explain myself. People say my name—I don’t have to pronounce and re-pronounce my name. I don’t have to ask anybody for permission to be there. I’m not living under an expiry date

Unseers (2020). Photo courtesy Sagarika Sundaram

I want to turn to the boundaries in your work for a moment. You have traversed the slash between “art” and “design” throughout your career. Where do you see the lines between art and design as they relate to how you conceive of and make your work?

Yeah, it's something I think about a lot and every day. The biggest distinction between art and design is the industry sees it very differently, though the skill set I’m using has a huge overlap. Right now, I’m also working on a project for a 100-year old rug company. It's work that feels like there’s still concept, there’s materiality and construction and all of that, but it has to function, it has to have a place in people’s life. It still has all those values that are very much part of my practice—making more from less, sustainability, starting from scratch, trying to limit waste—it still comes from the same wellspring, but it’s being produced at scale.

Art opens up questions, it opens up a conversation. It’s like almost a probe, a gesture that creates a space for something around it. Design can do this too, formally, or through systems thinking and social engagement. At the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, where I did my first degree, there was a strong emphasis on social concerns, particularly in classes with my late professor MP Ranjan. I feel fortunate to have an Asian foundation with a rooted concern in people, culture, and context.

So my education and professional experience in design strongly influence my art practice, which situates itself in the imagined. My design practice, in contrast, situates itself in the everyday. I’m drawn to the domestic. I enjoy softening spaces with textiles. My expertise is rugs, and I make commercial work alongside artworks that live on the floor.

This makes me wonder: if design is part of the everyday, is art not? And where do questions of sustainability and, perhaps, tradition enter the space between art and design?

Sustainability is such a huge part of why I do my work and the choices I make in my practice. I’m curious about work that uses materials like spray paint; when I see metal that’s mined, you know, where does this material come from and where does it go? What’s the death of this artwork? The Jeff Koons huge metal sculpture—how is it going to die, is it going to end up in some landfill? What is that graveyard of contemporary art going to look like? It’s going to be another art piece in itself, maybe. These decaying things that will not vanish and that are a burden on the planet.

I don’t want my work to be a burden on the planet, and I think those systems and ways of doing that I often engage with, I turn to, “oh, how did they do it before?” You know those systems were so in sync with what was around people; it feels like the harm is minimal, like they’ve already solved some things. In Brooklyn, I read about a recycling collection system where people go around and collect compost and waste—basically local networks to recycle more effectively—and all of these things are relationships that are very old and embedded in South Asia: kantha, rafoogari and all that, the equivalent. So I'm always looking for those ways of resourcefulness and problem solving because I’m inspired by them. I want to look at the parts of these systems that are resourceful and thoughtful and economical, because those are the values I want to carry.

Is biomimicry something that feels relevant to your current work? Or are there other words you would use to describe your inspiration?

Maybe it’s biomemory rather than mimicry. I remember looking at lots of pictures of undersea creatures, and they just showed up in my work. I’m interested in that space in nature which is ferocious and dangerous. There is something about a flesh-eating sea creature that allows me to recognize those qualities in me, gives me room to feel them.

Wool Brick / Power Diagram (2020). Photo courtesy Sagarika Sundaram

I think of your Wool Bricks as an intervention in design but also as an artistic proposition, and I would love for you to talk about the making of those bricks. What is involved in that process, and why do they look the way that they do? What does that eye-like, psychedelic symbol mean as it shows up elsewhere in your practice?

It came from material understanding. It was a Sunday morning, and I remember thinking, “what if I encased wool on wool and made this sphere and sliced it and opened it—what would it be?” It was just an inquiry, curiosity. I was kind of tired of design in a way, because design is always, “why are you doing this? What is it for? What is the purpose? How is it living in the world?” And I just needed to cleanse myself to follow something from instinct. I also felt like I was putting work on Instagram and felt it prematurely forced an end to its development. I then asked, “what does it mean, as a creative person, to not finish something in two days or a week but have the end be further out, taking the long view, when you don’t know upfront how the work will resolve...where will that take you?” I wanted to engage with work in that way.

In my first year of graduate school, I started making smaller versions of these spirals. I layered wool, red, white, red, white, and then I rolled it up and made these long tubes from them, and then I sliced them into discs. So it was just this idea of creating density and slicing that I was playing with. And then I put the slices together to create articulated surfaces, which moved in an undulation, and I was thinking of them as wall insulation, and thinking about the properties of wool and how this could be something like a design application. But then I decided to scale it up.

I’ve had this workshop in Himachal Pradesh’s number on my phone for two years but was hesitant to initiate a relationship without visiting in person. But then I was like, “ok, it’s my Masters, let me give this a shot. Let me explore, let me see how we work together. How do I engage with an entity like an artisan workshop? What are my values when I work with them?” I thought it was a good opportunity to test those questions. Whatsapp was key—I showed them videos and pictures of how each thing was made, and how it moved, and I said, “what’s the largest you can make it?” They were just willing to ride along with me with my idea and it was really like a back and forth. In a way my question pushed him to also create tools of communication to show what his capabilities are in terms of dyeing, in terms of color, in terms of material. I was working with limited info trying to make more with less. We basically spoke on the phone now and then, just really text-based and leaving voice notes and stuff. It was not perfect but it worked well.

So who is he? The person that I am talking about is called Dr. Kamal Kishore, Kamal ji. He’s a scientist and he started a workshop in the 90s that employs local women and men. They knit, they felt, they create textiles, they work with fiber to create products. He’s a lovely dynamic person, I just loved how curious he was, and willing to experiment. I had this ambitious idea, we just kind of went for it and made these huge logs. I was making decisions quickly, learning by doing, then feeding that learning back into more making. I said, “please slice them and send them, don’t slice some, some of them should be these colors, mix two along with white.” When he showed me the first spirals, I asked, “can you put a column inside it so it’s a bit like an eye?” That’s when it started connecting with me in a more conceptual way and it stopped being about the making. That’s what all the making is for, you make make make make make and you don’t know where it’s going to take you and then you hit something, suddenly: oh, this reads like an eye, a psychedelic swirling eye that has its own energy. It was also a crazy nightmare because he sent me a whole bunch of these things and they got stuck in lockdown. They couldn't get shipped, so they got fungus, moldy. When they came over I had to soak them in salt water and vinegar, one by one, to stop them from rotting, and that itself has given me more ideas about decay and growth, so I really see each stage of the life of the object as [provocation] to continue asking questions about things I’m interested in.

The part that was really lovely was, at the end of the whole thing he sent me this really heartwarming picture: with the waste from all the slicing, they made an art piece in their studio—this huge wall art piece, a kind of flower—and it made me very happy. It made me feel like they responded to the work and they engaged with it in a way that is inspiring and generative. Next we have plans to meet in person to continue the work.

Working in Himachal Pradesh. Photo courtesy Sagarika Sundaram

So tell me about this eye. Is it an eye that sees—and is it an eye that sees in the way that human eyes see? Where does the eye live?

That’s a really nice question. There are so many answers to this. Sometimes it’s a headdress, it's the head, and it’s multi-eyes that are the head. Sometimes it’s a mask. Sometimes it’s a metaphor for lack of actual eyes. I see it as a cosmic eye. I’m interested in the idea of the infinite. The fact that I came to my material—this way of making, it’s so old. It came from Mesopotamia or the “fertile crescent” 15,000 years ago and it spread to all these different parts of the world. I love that it lives in all these places simultaneously and separately. To me it is evidence that we are all connected. It’s like a fingerprint. Through my work I’m looking for the fingerprint.

I’m working on a room filled with it: you’re inside these eyes looking at you. Where do you go when you can’t make sense of anything, when you're in a corner? I think the only place to go when you’re cornered is inside. These eyes are like talismans that remind me to continue that journey.

Alankaram (2020). Photo courtesy Sagarika Sundaram

How do you see the eyes working in the context of your project The Unseers?

I imagine a world of oracles who are blind, and they wear headdresses of these eyes. When you look at these eyes, it’s like looking at the eye of a fly—it’s kind of like a honeycomb structure, a poly-headed thing. The multiplicity signifies more than just sight. These blind oracles have turned inwards because they can’t see—and this is an idea that keeps recurring in many different ways in Greek mythology. Like the blind soothsayer—

Teiresias!

Yeah. I must have read some of these things when I was young, but I didn't specifically refer to them when I was making this story. But I was so happy to come across that, and to see my expression of that archetype of the blind oracle. They are people who turned inwards as a response to war, a response to the war that I feel we are in right now. We are battling a war and we are not putting our finger on it, but we might look back and see this as kind of a siege that we all survived. And the only place to go from this moment, to start making sense of anything, is to [ask]: what does it mean to be humane to one another? What does it mean to treat somebody else with respect? Digital culture has created all these dynamics that have made me question what it means to be human, and I think the real place of starting to answer something is to go inside.

Unseers (2020). Photo courtesy Sagarika Sundaram

Unseers (2020). Photo courtesy Sagarika Sundaram

Do you see these oracles as migrant figures? When I've seen the work, there’s not only the head piece but there is a body—a sort of garment that also could be a dwelling. Elsewhere in your research you’ve talked about an interest in the use of wool for nomadic dwelling structures, which I think is bound up in the wool brick, and is perhaps also bound up in The Unseers.

The question for me is what do I make explicit and what do I leave implicit. The technique originated amongst and is typically practiced by people in pastoral nomadic communities. They rear sheep, and when you keep sheep you naturally felt. I am not by any stretch calling myself a “global nomad” or any of these shitty millennial words, but I do feel like I’ve been an itinerant migrant, which makes me look at the experience of a pastoral nomad and think: what are the rhythms that you follow, what are those practices that keep you in connection to the soil, without romanticizing them? I’m fascinated by this story of Genghis Khan. He had tents, when he was in war time, that were made out of felt, and one of the reasons he was so successful was because his camp could pack up and fold really quickly and move.

I was thinking of how wool is used for structural strength and protection, and not just as a sweater or a pair of socks. That's what made me make Wool Brick, because I was thinking about building materials and systems of living, and I was surrounded by all these conversations about people making building materials from hemp and other organic materials; zero carbon housing. I thought that this cylindrical brick structure that I came up could be a really interesting building material and a lightweight insulation. Zero carbon housing is all about insulation because when you save money on heat, you cut down on your cost. It’s got serious structural strength. I can stand on it. I want to make furniture out of it. But when I’m making furniture out of it, am I making just a chair, or am I making something that has a bigger story? Am I building out the world of The Unseers? Could it be another object, another being?

I want to bring us back to your earlier piece Oracle, because clearly the oracle is a motif in your work. And I think that the big, beautiful, psychedelic, very physical work—full of pockets and incisions and swirls—feels very map-like. It kind of binds questions of migration to questions of seeing, of psychedelic vision, and of an embodied understanding of a migrant experience. Could you tell me a little bit about the making of that piece, and if you see it as something that thematically unifies strands of your thinking?

I was making it very intuitively. I was understanding the material and learning about it as I was working with it. It’s probably my most ambitious piece in its scale and I have a lot of love for it. I called it Oracle because it just kept telling me things, you know? It really feels alive to me, like it’s moving, and my eye can never rest on one part of it, it just wants to keep on moving.

Sagarika Sundaram with Oracle (2019) at Casa Pedregal, Mexico City. Photo by Denisse Ariana Pérez

Sagarika Sundaram with Oracle (2019) at Casa Pedregal, Mexico City. Photo by Denisse Ariana Pérez

The actual laying of the work took me about 10 days and I was doing it on my living room floor, but I couldn't have gotten there without months of understanding, experiments. I had different varieties of wool—some from the lower Himalayas, some merino wool. It was also an exercise in working fast. I had indigo around me, I could make blue fast. I was working with what I had around me. I often say it’s like cooking in a kitchen like when I work. I remember my grandmother bending over doing a big kolam on the floor. I‘m moving in that same way, the way my mother sweeps the floor with a broom—the oldest embodied knowledge that I feel like I’m benefitting from, to do the work, to move and to have the gestures that I can have. So I dyed three or four different kinds of wool in three different colors, so I had a palette of nine. And then I was working on the floor. It was awfully dark. But, in a way, I was also unseeing because I laid the face down first and then was building on it, so all I could see was successive backings. It was kind of like a photographic negative. From that un-seeing comes a certain amount of freedom.

I control it 95%, and this 5% of movement is what keeps me moving forward. My work, when I turn it around, when I roll it and when I wet it, it fuses together, the fiber fuses together. I flip it over, and that moment is like...I wish I could share that moment with more people, because it's just this moment of surprise when the work shows itself to me. It’s like a vision. That kind of revelation when something is revealed to you, when you walk around a corner in a museum or gallery and see an artwork that reveals itself to you, that changes you, that takes your breath away. That is a feeling that drives me forward. There’s so much beauty and joy in that moment. I just want to be able to share that transformation, and see how people respond.