This autumn, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary sculpture has taken over the galleries at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Sagarika Sundaram: Reservoir runs from 30 September 2026 to 10 January 2027 and marks the New York–based Indian artist’s first museum exhibition and her first institutional solo show in Europe. Built from hand-dyed wool compressed into felt, the works are soft to the eye but sculptural in every sense: weighty, cavernous, layered and full of hidden colour.
What is Reservoir? An entirely new body of work
Reservoir brings together an entirely new body of work, made especially for the exhibition. Every piece was produced in Kutch, in north-west India, where Sundaram has been developing her research into felt-making and dyeing techniques.
The show follows an extended period of research into material, colour and process, and it represents a significant moment in the artist’s career. It also reflects Henry Moore Institute’s ongoing commitment to artists who test and expand what sculpture can be.
Highlights: Blue Mountain, Dancer and the rope sculpture
Blue Mountain (2026)
At the heart of the exhibition is Blue Mountain (2026), a monumental felt sculpture stretching almost seven metres in length. Its rolling, undulating forms open into cave-like hollows that visitors can walk around — and almost step into. It’s the kind of work that turns a gallery visit into a bodily experience.
Dancer (2026)
Rising from floor to ceiling, Dancer (2026) spirals upward in a form that feels part shell, part living movement. The sweep of the wool gives physical shape to the energy its title suggests.
A sculpture about rope-making
Another work reconstructs the process of rope-making. Through repetition, accumulation and twisting, Sundaram gives one of humanity’s oldest functional materials a new sculptural presence — rope as line, as labour, as utility and as form.
How Sagarika Sundaram makes felt sculpture
Sundaram’s process is slow, physical and labour-intensive. She lays out raw wool, then uses water, soap, pressure and friction to bind the loose fibres into dense felt. Rather than working on a finished surface, she builds each piece in layers — dyeing, stacking and compressing wool again and again.
Then comes the decisive moment: she cuts the felt open. Incisions reveal the colours, pockets and forms that were sealed inside all along. Nothing is added at this stage; the interior was always there, waiting to be uncovered. The Institute describes this act of opening as a kind of excavation, turning a seemingly complete form into a complex space.
Because the colour is dyed into the fibre rather than painted on top, it becomes part of the sculpture’s structure. The revealed layers hold the history of their own making — the labour, pressure and change accumulated over time. The results evoke flowers, seedpods, caves, shells, rock strata, bodies and architecture, often all at once.
While her materials are soft, Sundaram engages with the core concerns of sculpture: volume and void, surface and depth, scale, space and the way our bodies relate to objects. Her work is often described as sitting between carving and moulding — and between painting and sculpture.
Why wool and felt? An ancient material for a contemporary language
Wool has sheltered and clothed people for millennia. Since sheep were first domesticated roughly 11,000 years ago, wool has moved between the domestic, the economic and the architectural. Felt itself is one of the oldest ways of turning loose fibre into structure, and it likely predates woven cloth. Unlike woven fabric, felt has no warp and weft: its fibres lock together in every direction, creating a dense, continuous mass with its own strength and unpredictability.
That history gives Reservoir a special resonance in Leeds, a city whose growth was built on the wool and textile trade. Seeing an Indian-born artist transform this deeply local material through techniques developed in Kutch draws a quiet line between two textile cultures.
Who is Sagarika Sundaram?
Sagarika Sundaram was born in Kolkata, India, in 1986, into a Tamil family, and grew up between India and Dubai. She now lives and works in New York. She studied at the National Institute of Design (NID), Ahmedabad, and at MICA in Baltimore, before completing an MFA in Textiles at Parsons School of Design, The New School.
Recent solo exhibitions include Alison Jacques, London and Nature Morte, Delhi (both 2025) and Palo Gallery, New York (2023). In 2025 she presented her installation Released Form (2024) at Art Basel Unlimited, having previously shown it in the UBS Lounge at Art Basel Miami Beach. Group exhibitions include the Bronx Museum (2024), the Al Held Foundation and River Valley Arts Collective (2023), the British Textile Biennial and the Chicago Architecture Biennial.
Sundaram’s interest lies in the long history of textiles and their roots in a pre-industrial world , a shared material language that crosses cultures and centuries.
Textile art has long been treated as a separate category from “serious” sculpture. Reservoir challenges that division head-on. Staged at an institution dedicated to the study of sculpture in the city where Henry Moore began his training, the exhibition argues that felt can carry the same weight, scale and ambition as bronze or stone.
Cover image: Sagarika Sundaram, ‘Blue Mountain’ 2026, dyed wool, steel. Courtesy the artist, Henry Moore Institute and Alison Jacques, London. Photo: Minyung Im.
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