Long before looms were invented to weave wool, nomadic herders were turning raw sheep’s fleece into warm, weather-proof shelters using one of humanity’s earliest craft techniques: felting.
Felting is a process of matting and fusing animal fibres together with moisture, heat and friction into a dense, non-woven fabric. In her new exhibition, Reservoir, textile artist Sagarika Sundaram revisits this ancient process.
On display at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, felt is transformed and revitalised as a series of dynamic, large-scale sculptures that oscillate between raw material energy and precise artistic control.
Unlike woven or knitted textiles, the cut edge of felt is stable and does not fray. This allows Sundaram to show us what’s inside the fabric: compacted, colourful bands that look like geological strata or layers of skin.
But for the majority of these new works, made in Kutch, northwestern India, she dyes the already felted pieces. In doing so, she acknowledges a rich lineage of traditional dye practices, such as Indian bandhani and leheriya), Japanese shibori and Indonesian ikat. These methods rely on precise manual actions (such as folding or tying parts of the fabric) so that when the piece is submerged in dye, the physical gestures are permanently recorded on and within the cloth.
Where traditional resist-dyeing aims for tightly controlled, predictable patterns, Sundaram allows the thick, unpredictable nature of heavy felt to dictate the final outcome. The dye penetrates unevenly through the dense layers, creating results that cannot be exactly replicated. Yet, a rhythmic structure remains: she repeats a cycle of folding, tying, dyeing, cutting and unfolding, allowing a systematic process to yield organic, unrepeatable forms.
Blue Mountain is the first work visitors encounter in the exhibition and it dominates the first space. It evokes both a massive geological shift (resembling a mountain formed by folding tectonic plates) and a shelter with spaces and nooks inviting the visitor to crawl into.
This brings to mind both a cave and a tent, providing protection and the potential of a domestic space. The enclosed space formed of felt relates to German architect Gottfried Semper’s ideas around architecture and textiles, in particular the concept of enclosure. Semper argued that “the beginning of building coincides with the beginning of textiles”.
The weighty folded textile, dyed with indigo, activates numerous possibilities of a hiding place or shelter, while carrying the viewer’s gaze towards a furrowed Kutch mountain (Kutch is known for it’s rich textile heritage) creating a place potentially both soft and hard in the imagination.
The colour palette Sundaram uses for each sculpture is limited in comparison to her previous works. In piece Looking Together, for example, the natural colour of the sheep’s wool dictates the shades as it does in majority of felt used for Dancer, bar flashes of red that feature near the top of the spiral.
Looking Together appears like a hanging hide, with the cuts creating forms that emerge and emphasise the folds to provide a sense of weight. Cuts are generative, as Sundaram acknowledges when the bindings are cut and the material “opens like a secret”, revealing what she has or has not embedded in the fabric. She describes this process like a pop-up book, emerging and blooming.
Dancer projects a sense of lightness and solidity that can also be seen in Blue Mountain. It features a soft spiralling movement, which she compares to peeling an orange by hand – except here, scissors replace fingers. By slicing through the thick felt, the cut edges reveal the contrasting inner and outer sides of the material at once, effectively blurring the line between interior and exterior as the form carves through the gallery space.
The surface colouration and pattern remain ambiguous, leaving it unclear whether visitors are looking at an animal pelt or layered rock formations. As we view the sculpture, the cross-section of striated felt (showing distinct, parallel layers of natural wool and dye) moves slowly in front of our eyes.
In Glossolalia (which means speaking in tongues), the technique of twisting fibres appears alongside felting to create an organic piece that resembles a mass of branches covered in acid-coloured moss and lichen.
Felting and weaving have generally coexisted as textile techniques. Twisted wool or yarn recalls the industry of woollen cloth production that was historically important to Leeds and Yorkshire more widely. In Rope, this reference appears more explicitly with a multi-coloured, oversized hank of yarn displayed on the floor. Yet it appears not as a neat twist, but with cut ends exposed, some trailing on the ground, reinforcing that the work was not made by a regulated industrial process, but rather wound by hand with the help of a tractor.
Anthropologist Tim Ingold has argued that: “The properties of materials … are not attributes but histories.” Sundaram’s work around the qualities of wool implicitly shows us glimpses of these multiple histories that continue into methods of making today, shaped by the hands that crafted these works in Kutch, Gujarat.
Making as a collective process was determined not only by necessity, given the heavy weight and scale of the materials, but also by building on what came before in her own practice and far beyond it. Sundaram describes the process as “walking backwards into the future”.
Her use of ancient techniques and materials with complex, rooted histories allows her to look back while moving forward, creating a commanding body of contemporary work.
Sagarika Sundaram: Reservoir is at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, until January 10 2027
Hannah Sabapathy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.