Interact with art in this unique garden

Born and brought up in Delhi, Sumakshi trained in painting at MS University, Baroda and has exhibited at some of the world’s most sought after galleries. She creates site-specific installations, using mixed media. Her show, entitled ‘In the Garden’, posits three stories. 

“The first pays homage to the experience of two particularly lush, illuminated, breathing, dying and resurrecting gardens which now outlive their creators – one planted by my mother, another by a Swiss hermit in the Himalayas. They are truly portals into a dimension of magic and possibility. The second space offered is of their memory – a flattening out of experience — a cataloguing, archiving and preserving of lacelike words from personal letters which levitate without a ground to attach themselves to, fragile woven-skeletons of pressed flowers, leaves and seeds, floating in glass vitrines, seemingly embroidered on air, fossil-like imprints of embroideries on plaster. 

The third story is of the experience of memory: layered veils, thread-images concealed and revealed in a mist,” she says. Sumakshi, who has been one of the youngest educators to have taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and lectured at Oxford University, among several other prestigious institutions, attempts to describe the creative process. 

“I begin with an idea, but gradually, the art pieces take on a life of their own. My role is more that of a midwife trying to facilitate the birth of something. It makes the process beautiful, fresh and full of surprises and the work seems much richer and larger than the original seed idea which conceived it,” she explains. She says her concepts come from “looking again and again and again until the same mundane thing reveals something amazing about itself”. 

How people ‘see art’ has been the central question of most of her work. “In some cases they see tiny sculptures placed in constructed cracks, holes or other scars in the wall and are confronted with their own mental boundaries of what is art and what isn’t. Very often after people leave the gallery space, the feedback I receive is that a certain way of looking and paying attention was triggered which caused them to re-evaluate their own familiar visual environment. A change in perception, a re-looking,” she says with clarity.