Shagun Agarwal is a multidisciplinary artist and psychologist, who treats making as a way of staying with feelings long enough for them to take shape. Working across drawing, installation, textiles, sculpture, and text, Agarwal draws on her background in clinical psychology and community mental health to explore how memory, gender, queerness, and vulnerability shape who we become. An integral focus of her practice is the body, which she sees as a living, mutating archive that absorbs grief, desire, pleasure, and social conditioning long before we can put any of it into words. Her work has been shown at Jaipur Art Week, Art of India (curated by Dr. Alka Pande), Chitrayaan at Jawahar Kala Kendra, the Women’s Museum Mumbai, and the Bhor Mental Health Festival.
In this conversation with Abir Pothi, Shagun Agarwal talk about where her work begins, what it means to document change, and her larger creative philosophy that guides her.
Q: How did you find your way to art, and what can you tell us about those early days?
Shagun Agarwal: I was always drawn to creating things, but what helped was a very quirky and loving art teacher in school; my father laminating the most nonsensical drawings of mine and encouraging me to draw on our walls, and winning an art competition that took me my mom and my school principal on a free trip to Monaco. The Princess of Monte Carlo had asked 7 kids from different continents to be the jury of their international circus festival and I, miraculously, was one of them.
I have always been painting and drawing, sometimes to channelize the intensity of my emotions, which in retrospect has also helped me understand my inner world. Once I have translated the inner movement, I understand it and what happens while creating is purely intuitive.
I have tried multiple careers. My bachelors and masters was in psychology, I have worked as a graphic designer, as a therapist, a podcast host, a researcher, and as a Copywriter in Ogilvy, mumbai. Yet all the roads that led me to these careers also led me to the discomfort that I was moving away from my heart, my art. I was very close to going to NYU for another Masters in Art Therapy, but I decided to stop moving around my true desires and take a courageous step and move right towards it.
Looking back, I don’t think I ever really left art. I kept finding ways to approach it through different disciplines, even when I wasn’t consciously building an art practice. Psychology gave me a language for the inner world, advertising taught me how to communicate an idea, and research taught me to sit with questions. Eventually, I began to understand that all these experiences could exist within my art, rather than in separate compartments of my life. Coming back to art has felt less like starting something new and more like returning to something that had been patiently waiting for me.
Q: You’ve said most of your work begins with a sensation or unease rather than a clear idea. Can you walk us through your creative process?
Shagun Agarwal: My process usually begins with something I cannot quite name. It could be a feeling of restlessness, a recurring visual, an unfamiliar sensation in my body, or simply the sense that something is shifting within me. I don’t always know what it means, and I have learned not to force an explanation too early.
I begin by drawing, painting, or playing with forms, allowing intuition to lead before the intellect steps in. Often, the work starts making sense to me only after it has taken shape. The act of making becomes a way of thinking, except that the thinking happens through colour, texture, movement and form rather than language.
I am particularly drawn to biomorphic forms and imagined creatures, forms that seem to be in the middle of becoming something else. They allow me to work with experiences that resist definition. I don’t necessarily want to resolve the unease that initiates a work. Sometimes I want to give it a body, a landscape, or a world in which it can exist without having to explain itself.
Q: You describe the body as a “living, mutating archive.” What has your own body recorded that later appeared in your work, and how do you choose which materials, whether textile, sculpture, drawing or text, can hold those memories?
Shagun Agarwal: That’s a great question. My own body in the recent past has been a vessel for so many absurd, random, unresolved, unprocessed, raw and heavy feelings, it’s like that chair we all have in our homes where our unfolded clothes go, a waiting room for experiences that need to be held. My conscious mind has not been able to comprehend it all and honestly my body has very gracefully make space for it, patiently waiting for me to take notice of all that its holding and fold them and put them where they’re meant to go. While it holds — contains, it’s form keeps changing. Essentially, that is what my work is moving towards.
I am interested in the body not just as something that experiences the world, but as something that is constantly being altered by it. We often think of memory as something stored in the mind, something we can retrieve, narrate and make sense of. But there are experiences that stay with us without becoming coherent stories. They live in our instincts, our discomforts, our ways of occupying space, and the ways we protect or expose ourselves. The body carries these experiences even when we don’t have the language for them. I think of my work as an attempt to give these intangible forms of lived experience a material presence.
What has come most naturally to me has been painting, and as a self-taught artist I still feel the need to expand and keep exploring new material to see where the material’s knowledge also meets my vision. I am looking for ways for my artwork to hold onto translucency and luminosity – so material like glass and ceramics are also ones I am exploring with.
I am increasingly interested in materials that can embody the very qualities I am trying to explore: translucency, permeability, containment, fragility and transformation. Textile, for instance, carries an intimate relationship with the body. It wraps, protects, conceals and remembers. I have an upcoming exhibition in Delhi where I will be displaying a moment in time that I am creating with Jaipur Rugs, so I am also trying to explore my forms in different mediums. Sculpture allows me to make these internal experiences spatial, giving them volume and a physical presence in the world. I don’t think of material as a neutral surface onto which I impose an idea. Each material has its own behavior, limitations and possibilities, and I am interested in the point where its inherent qualities meet something I am trying to articulate. Perhaps the work, like the body itself, is never quite finished holding or becoming.
Q: You trained and worked as a clinical psychologist. How does that training show up in the studio, and where do clinical and artistic ways of knowing pull against each other?
Shagun Agarwal: I think that training allows me to excavate my inner experiences, it pours over in symbolism, in colours, in shape and form – it has enhanced my self-knowledge to such an extent that I realised that intellectualising my experience is going to be never-ending, and it is taking me into a loop from which there is no coming back. So I decided to take a step back and look more into a non-verbal way of knowing and exploring the self – through my art, which has come to me naturally since I was a child.
Psychology encourages you to observe, identify patterns, make connections and find language for what you are experiencing. These are valuable tools, and they continue to inform the way I approach my inner world. But in the studio, I have had to learn to loosen my need to understand everything. Not every experience needs to be interpreted immediately, and not every feeling needs to be turned into an insight or a resolution.
Art has allowed me to stay with uncertainty without treating it as a problem that needs to be solved. There is a kind of knowledge that emerges through making, one that is felt before it is understood. I am interested in that space between knowing and not knowing, where something can be true without yet being explainable. In many ways, my practice has become an attempt to trust that space.
Q: Who or what has shaped the way you see and make work, whether that’s artists, places, people, or experiences outside art?
Shagun Agarwal: My lived experience, training in psychology, my experiences of navigating identity, and the different professional worlds I have inhabited have all shaped the way I look at the self and the world around me. I am drawn to questions of how we become who we are, how much of that becoming is our own choice, and how much is shaped by the worlds we inhabit.
I am attentive to the instability of categories and the ways we are expected to make ourselves known to others. I am interested in what exists outside fixed definitions, in identities that are fluid, contradictory, and constantly becoming. This finds its way into my work through forms that resist easy classification, that seem to be in a state of transformation.
I am also influenced by Indian visual and material traditions, particularly the possibilities of textiles, traditional processes, and the symbolic language of mythology. My experience of working with indigo, resist dyeing, embroidery and installation has made me think about how contemporary inner experiences can inhabit older material vocabularies without simply reproducing them.
More than any one influence, I think I am shaped by the things I cannot immediately make sense of. I am drawn to the unfamiliar, to contradictions, and to the possibility that something can be many things at once. That openness is important to the way I make work.
Q: Your work invites people into ambiguity and discomfort, and also into community healing. How do you balance making space for vulnerability with taking care of the people who encounter it, especially in workshops and mental health settings?
Shagun Agarwal: My background in psychology has made me aware that vulnerability cannot be demanded from someone, and that creating a space for it is different from expecting people to disclose something personal. I think the most important thing is to allow people agency over their own experiences. They should be able to participate, observe, share, or remain quiet without feeling that they have to arrive anywhere in particular.
In my workshops, I am interested in making the act of creating accessible beyond the pressure to produce something beautiful or technically accomplished. The emphasis is on the experience of making, on noticing what emerges when we allow ourselves to work without constantly judging or correcting ourselves. Sometimes that can open up difficult feelings, but it can also create moments of play, curiosity, and unexpected connection. I want them to experience something novel and new, with freeness and play.
Q: What are you curious about or working toward next, and what do you hope someone takes away from encountering your work?
Shagun Agarwal: I am currently interested in expanding my practice beyond the two-dimensional surface and exploring materials that can hold light, translucency, and a sense of life within them. I want to experiment more with glass, ceramics, textiles and sculptural forms, and to understand how these materials can help me build immersive, imagined worlds. I am particularly drawn to the idea of soft futurism: imagining new forms of existence, new abilities, and new kinds of beings beyond the human as we currently understand it. I have an exhibition coming up in the Visual Arts Gallery, IHC, Curated by the talented Dr. Alka Pande, where my imagined worlds will be up for display.
I want to create works that feel as though they belong to a world that is still taking shape, where the familiar becomes strange and the strange becomes possible. I am interested in how mythology, material traditions, and speculative futures can meet in a contemporary visual language. I also want to continue developing work that moves between the intimate scale of the body and the larger scale of installation, allowing personal experiences to become something spatial, shared and universal.
As for what I hope someone takes away from encountering my work, a new perspective on something, hopefully self-exploration, a relatability of experience, the feeling of being seen. I would like my work to offer someone a way into their own inner world, perhaps through a form or a feeling they recognise without quite knowing why. some people also seem to leave with discomfort, which honestly I like – I like that it made you step out of what was easy to consume and see.
I don’t think art necessarily needs to give us answers. Sometimes it can simply help us ask a question we hadn’t known how to articulate, or make us feel a little less alone in an experience we thought belonged only to us. If someone leaves with a greater sense of curiosity about themselves, or with permission to exist in a state of uncertainty and becoming, I think the work has done something meaningful.
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