The Poetry of Place

In this Draft, writer and editorial director Martha Schabas explores the work of artist Sagarika Sundaram, uncovering how art and design can reconnect us with the natural world and deepen our sense of self. Immerse yourself in their reflections and awaken your creative bond with nature.

Maybe you had a treehouse as a child where you sat high above your neighborhood and felt as ancient as the roots beneath you. Or maybe there’s a shack by the sea where you like to sip wine and contemplate the vastness of the ocean. There’s something magical about spaces that are both wild and tame, natural and cultivated; they underscore our connection to the earth and remind us that we’re part of something older than our cities, skyscrapers, and monuments.

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In Paris last summer, standing outside of Le Panthéon in 30-degree weather, a stranger gave my three-year-old son a metro ticket. A souvenir to take home, the woman said, explaining the 120-year old tickets are being phased out in favor of new smartcards. My son stuffed the ticket in his pocket and forgot about it instantly. But I made a point of fishing it out from his shorts later that night. What was of little interest to my three-year-old was full of memories for me.

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Ten years ago, I’d come to Paris to get away from my life for a while and to finish the novel I was writing. I sublet an apartment in the 18th arrondissement, just north of the noise of Montmartre. My desk overlooked an old courtyard with a black locust tree that erupted from the cobblestones. On sunny days, I’d open the French doors and push my desk against the balcony’s grate so that I was perched between indoors and outdoors. I’ve always been drawn to spaces where there’s little distinction between interior and exterior. There’s something about these in-between worlds that feels both calming and stirring, allowing the weather to seep into my mood. As an author, I crave this closeness to nature’s volatility. But I’d never go so far as to set up a workspace outdoors. It’s the tension between the internal and external that inspires me.

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My interest in this tension is what drew me to Sagarika Sundaram’s striking work. A sculptor and artist born in India and based in New York City, Sagarika uses an ancient technique of felting that involves hand-dyeing raw wool and diffusing it with soapy water to create complex, textured structures that rise from the ground, hang from the ceiling, wrap around trees, or fill the crevices between boulders. She is fascinated by the inseparability of humans from the natural world, and by the tension between inside and outside. “Nature is deeply embedded in my psychology,” she tells me. “I like to cut things open—geodes, crystals, flowers. I’m driven by the mystery of what’s inside,” she says.

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We are chatting over Zoom on a sunny autumn afternoon. I’m in Toronto and she’s in one of her three of her Manhattan studios. Speaking about her work, she’s eager to show me photographs from recent exhibitions, and pauses on a vivid mural of cloth, raw wool, and dangling threads. Near its center is an oval shape embedded in a network of veiny wires. “I am drawn to forms that are abstract and can be read in many ways—this could be a carnivorous flower or an eyeball,” she says with a smile. “My work explores our relationship with what’s untameable. I think it captures an aspect of nature that is ferocious, seductive, which mirrors human nature in a sense.”

Creating portals to distinct worlds

Sagarika knows that her fascination with the human-environment relationship stems back to her childhood. Born in Kolkata, she moved around while growing up and found herself contending with distinctly different landscapes. As a child, she lived with her family in Dubai, hardly the metropolis it is now but an “urban desert” surrounded by sandy barren land, with warm winters and inhospitably hot summers. Then she returned to India to attend an experimental boarding school in a lush valley in the south, which was deeply inspiring to her fledgling creativity. “It was the first time I had so much natural space,” she says. “The valley was a big receptacle for our development. We used to go for hikes on the hills—it was a huge part of our education.”

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At the school, Sagarika developed a ritual with nature that was formative for her. Every day, she’d walk under a tall amaltas tree where, for a few minutes, she’d feel the purest joy. “It had brilliant yellow leaves that looked so striking in the light and created beautiful flickering shadows,” she says. When a friend witnessed the ritual and asked what on earth she was laughing about, Sagarika didn’t feel embarrassed, but seen. “She was telling me that these intangible moments of happiness were real,” she explains.

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Today, Sagarika works in a studio at the Silver Arts Project, on the 28th floor of Four World Trade Center. Vast windows overlook the 9/11 memorial and the Hudson River. Here, the tension between human-made and natural comes to a poetic head. Perched high above the glass and concrete jungle of lower Manhattan, Sagarika works in an ancient tradition, turning huge swathes of raw, fluffy fiber into cloth. She’s in a period of immense growth with her art, which introduces yet another tension with the cramped city beneath her. “New York is kind of antithetical to the idea of space,” she says. “But that interests me, too. Between New York and India, I have two lives that are full of creativity, connections, friendships, and joy. One wouldn’t work without the other; New York would become very claustrophobic for me and India has its limitations, too. I feel very grateful to have these two thriving ecosystems of making and creativity,” she explains.

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Lately, Sagarika has been taking her art outdoors, experimenting with how it interacts with less controlled environments. She has become increasingly interested in the architectural realm, creating spaces that the viewer can walk through and experience physically. She shows me a photograph of a work titled Passage Along the Edge of the Earth, a tent-like structure made from a single piece of cloth that she felted together using layers of Himalayan wool compressed into a grainy texture. She tells me it’s inspired by Buddhist stupas and her desire to explore the kinetic relationship generated between a human body and a built structure. “I want to see how people interact with my work and create portals into distinct worlds,” she says.

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Integrating nature to enhance well-being

Sagarika’s interest in the intersection of human, structure, and environment brings to mind long standing traditions in architecture and design. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright was deeply inspired by forms and patterns that occur in landscapes, light, and water. He wanted his houses and buildings to be temples of well-being, existing in perfect harmony with the world that surrounded them. He urged his students to “study nature, love nature, stay close to nature,” insisting that it would never fail them. One of his most celebrated building’s, the Guggenheim in New York City, was allegedly designed to resemble a nautilus shell, while its rotunda skylight brings to mind the radial symmetry of a spider web.

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Architecture that creates beneficial contact between people and nature is experiencing something of a renaissance right now. Biophilic design—an approach that looks to the natural world as a source of tranquility, productivity, and well-being—has guided the creation of many notable new spaces and buildings, from New York’s High Line and Paris’ Promenade Plantée to Apple Park in Silicon Valley and the Bosco Verticale (covered in 20,000 plants) in Milan. Biophilia posits that humans are at their best when they’re lives are integrated with nature; its inspiration is prehistoric, stemming from the fact that humanity evolved for thousands of years in adaptive response to the natural world, while our response to human-made constructs is but a blip in our species’ history. The thinking goes that we are most in our element—at peace with ourselves and our surroundings—when the spaces we occupy recreate that fluid, dynamic, and symbiotic relationship with nature.

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Sometime after my conversation with Sagarika, I come across the Paris metro ticket that I’d placed inside my journal. It’s just a flimsy piece of cardboard, but it has a gravitational pull on my memory, triggering a tide of images and feelings. Running my finger along the magnetic stripe, I am back on my balcony in the 18th arrondissement, overlooking the courtyard, the cobblestones, the locust tree. The sense of being suspended between inside and outside has a transcendent effect on me all over again; I feel calm, inspired, itching to write.

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Lately, I’ve been finding ways to airdrop this feeling into my mood on regular days. Sitting at my desk in Toronto, I try to see my surroundings differently by thinking of Sagarika’s fascination with the mystery of “what’s inside.” I gaze out my window and imagine cracking things open—the wilting geraniums in my amateur garden, the trunk of my crab apple tree, the leaf-covered soil that will soon harden under a first frost—to access deeper truths about nature. I guess you could say I’m trying to find the poetry of place in my work, and in my daily tasks more generally, by looking at the world more carefully and seeing whether the power of my attention can imbue the ordinary with the extraordinary. I’ve landed on a few techniques and triggers that are helping these days; I bet they’ll inspire you, too.

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Sagarika Sundaram is a New York-based sculptor and artist who makes installations using raw natural fiber and dyes. Her work has been exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Art, NY; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, Boiceville NY; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK; the Chicago Architecture Biennial; Nature Morte gallery, New Delhi, India and Palo Gallery, NYC. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and ARTnews. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the NID, Ahmedabad, and at MICA in Baltimore. She is a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in NYC. Sundaram is represented by Nature Morte (India) and Alison Jacques (UK).

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Martha Schabas is the editorial director of the House of Beautiful Business. She is the author of two novels, My Face in the Light (2022) and Various Positions (2011). She was previously the dance critic at The Globe and Mail, Canada’s largest national newspaper, where she also wrote about theater and books. Her essays, arts criticism, and short fiction have appeared in numerous publications.

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