Sagarika Sundaram

On the Grounds 2023 is the third in a series of outdoor exhibitions in the landscape surrounding Al Held’s studio complex, presenting works by Anina Major and Sagarika Sundaram. Taking the idea of home and inspired by the intimacy with which Held crafted the landscape as points of departure, the artists present site-responsive works using clay, fiber, and wood. Both artists employ their media’s unique relationship to environmental systems—for Sundaram, wool procured from grazing sheep—highlighting that, to make a home, it takes both people and their most cherished matter. For each artist, a deep engagement with material history underscores how culture and nature are entwined.

The vibrant spiraling geometries of Sundaram’s felted wool installations echo phenomena of geodes, shells, symbiotic lichen, among other natural wonders. Here she probes the boundaries among species by combining anthropomorphic, botanical, fungal, and mineral forms in niches throughout the landscape. Felted disks spill out from a cracked boulder (perhaps an erratic left by a moving glacier long ago?) and loop around the limbs of trees, like a drawing in space, and bring attention to the animation of matter we typically consider static. The dynamics of the patterning and accumulative shapes suggest a vital life energy which flows through all aspects of the earth.

The artist collaborates with Indian fiber producer Kullu Karishma celebrating the Central Asian cultures that have long been associated with felt, including nomadic groups who use it for shelter. In these works, wool from the Himalayas and the Hudson Valley co-exist as interlocutors, revealing how our concepts of ‘home’ and ‘here’ are interdependent. For Sundaram wool is a connective tissue among cultures and places in flux. Where humans live with animals, there is felt. Where there is a felt, we find connection.

Merino and Shetland wool for the project was provided by Cabbage Hill Farm in Mount Kisco, NY and processed by Battenkill Fibers in Greenwich, NY and Himalayan Gaddi wool was provided by Kullu Karishma from Himachal Pradesh, India.

- written by Jess Wilcox, 2023

Time Slip, 2023
Himalayan wool and shagbark hickory trees
50 x 40 x 30 feet