World of our own

Art can take many forms: a woman in New York making larger-than-life sculptures out of wool, two lovers in Delhi reconciling their working styles to start a fluid fashion brand and a mother in Copenhagen creating a visual archive of Indian food to ensure her children remember the flavours of home. Vogue India takes you inside their studios, where the magic happens

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Art can take many forms: a woman in New York making larger-than-life sculptures out of wool, two lovers in Delhi reconciling their working styles to start a fluid fashion brand and a mother in Copenhagen creating a visual archive of Indian food to ensure her children remember the flavours of home. Vogue India takes you inside their studios, where the magic happens From afar, Sagarika Sundaram’s sweeping textiles appear as abstract paintings teeming with colour and movement. There are flourishes of orange and red with tumultuous splashes of yellow and teal. It’s all very Pollock-esque. Upon closer inspection, however, the paint reveals itself to be felt, meticulously crafted by hand over many months.

There is a wild, untamed power to 38-year-old Sundaram’s sculptural, often airborne tapestries, an energy possibly inherited from her labour of making felt from scratch. It involves an elaborate performance of dyeing sheep’s wool: tearing the sun-seared, colour-stained raw material into slivers, splaying and crisscrossing the sections across a flat surface to create a composition and then soaking it in soapy water before subjecting it to friction and pressure. The resulting artworks produce fantastical forms, sometimes resembling tongue-like flaps with wild woollen streaks, other times mimicking portal-like openings in muted colours.