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Sumakshi Singh / India b.1980 / 33 Link Road (installation view) 2019 / Photograph: Anil Rane / Courtesy: The artist / © Sumakshi Singh
Sumakshi Singh33 Link Road 2019
Not Currently on Display
Sumakshi Singh’s ambitious sculptures and installations are rooted in the intimate processes of drawing and embroidery. Family memories led to the further development of Singh’s embroidered sculptures. Her grandparents arrived in Delhi as refugees after the Partition of India and gradually built the family home. As a child, Singh continually moved across the country, and so the old house in Delhi became her only understanding of a constant home, with its familiar surfaces, objects, stories and smells. After its long history of hosting the family, the house now lies abandoned.
The architectural features of the house have become the focus of Singh’s recent studies, beginning with a series of the different gates at the entry to the house, and developing into threaded windows, doors, staircases and architectural aspects. Lightly strung across walls or stretched like veils in space, the architectural forms appear delicate and malleable like the collection of memories they represent. Exposed hanging threads and unravelled stitching translate the house into vulnerable fragments, caught in a process of being undone.
As personal archives, Singh’s thread drawings come together to reveal ghostlike spaces where rigid architectures translate into soft veils of memory. While the forms become fragile and adaptable, they evoke the desire of the artist to tie down these fading memories, to stitch them permanently in the fabric of time.
Throughout her career, Sumakshi Singh has developed a spontaneous and responsive approach to material and space. Her practice is characterised by rigorous explorations of spatial intervention that play in the gap between conditioned knowledge and direct perception, and in the spaces between physical object and illusory experience.1 Her works engage narratives from inner landscapes — of personal memory, metaphysical and emotional experiences — as well as the history and physicality of sites.
Singh started developing a technique she refers to as ‘groundless thread drawings’ around 2015, after stumbling across some of her late mother’s letters. The artist felt a sudden desire to trace their words in embroidery — a technique her mother had tried to teach her as a child — using it to tie them down to the page. Ironically, once Singh finished, the words seemed to protest this fixity, and she began to remove the fabric they were on, allowing them to float in space like fragile embroidery in air.2 After some experimentation, the full possibility of this medium soon emerged, resulting in immersive installations of ethereal, life-size gardens of embroidered plant forms and architectural facades suspended in space.
Endnotes:
1 Sumakshi Singh in conversation with Roobina Karoda, Line, Beats & Shadows: Ayesha Sultana & Sumakshi Singh in Conversation with Roobina Karode (video), Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, streamed live 20 February 2020, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfOmfp3IMGg>, viewed June 2021.
2 Sumakshi Singh, artist statement, July 2021.