Rising up in Jaipur, surrounded by the gradual rhythms of a culturally wealthy metropolis, artist Radhika Surana didn’t realise how deeply its textures and traditions had been imprinting themselves on her. “The indigo blue which was all around the metropolis, the tradition of embroidery which I had at house, the relaxed gradual lifetime of a small metropolis; this background formed my technical vocabulary,” she says.
Transformations VII: Watercolour on 300 GSM paper and hand embroidery on fabric
| Picture Credit score:
Particular Association
Over time, Radhika understood that this affect was not nearly expertise or motifs, however about seeing making as “an act of devotion; repetition not as monotony however as a meditative rhythm.” This philosophy has carried via a artistic path that has been wide-ranging. A graduate in superb arts from Rajasthan College, Radhika educated beneath eminent artist Dwarka Prasad Sharma, studied watercolour and portraiture at Canadore Faculty, Ontario, and apprenticed with Canadian artist Charlie Rapsky.
It was solely when she started working with textiles that one thing in her settled. “Embroidery felt like mending, like returning to the primary language… the act of holding the material near oneself led me to a sense of belonging, care, and continuity,” she says. This deep relationship with cloth and time now anchors her newest solo exhibition, Someplace I Have By no means Travelled, on view at New Delhi’s Artwork Alive till August 20, 2025.
An art work that includes hand embroidery, pen marks
| Picture Credit score:
Particular Association
The load of Indigo
Borrowing its title from an E.E. Cummings’ poem, Someplace I Have By no means Travelled attracts on Radhika’s instinctive embroidery observe to discover human connection and emotional landscapes. Dyed in deep vats of indigo, her works weave private meditations with India’s textile heritage and its fraught colonial historical past.
“Indigo has all the time carried a double weight for me,” she says. “It’s private and historic. I can’t ignore indigo’s world previous: it fuelled commerce routes, wealth, and, tragically, techniques of enslavement and colonial extraction.” Working with the pigment pushes her in two instructions without delay: as a way of self-expression and a dialog with heritage.
An art work that includes embroidery on internet, handcrafted paper
| Picture Credit score:
Particular Association
The exhibition options 63 works formed by chance, likelihood, and the tactility of supplies. In a single, gauze hand-stitched over a cyanotype-printed fabric varieties delicate waves and tonal shifts, punctuated with minimal French knots. One other begins with deep darkish splashes, later softened with Japanese paper layering approach. There may be one other piece that treats cloth like watercolour, utilizing scraps to construct tonal values with cyanotype prints of vegetation. In a piece impressed by lichens on tree bark, brown contrasts with crème beads to create easy however intense imagery.
A non-public language in thread
For Radhika, the vocabulary of supplies advanced instinctively. She speaks of materials as collaborators, revealing their nature as soon as in her fingers. “Over time, these gestures started to behave like phrases in a personal language,” she says.
Knots mapped intimacy; charred or lower traces signalled rupture; restitched seams embodied restore. “The material grew to become a website the place emotional states may stay aspect by aspect. Magnificence intertwined with fracture; care layered over injury — simply as in any relationship between two people.”
Roots of the Relationship that includes wasli paper, cyanotype print and organza fabric
| Picture Credit score:
Particular Association
That hyperlink between lived expertise and visible language is deliberate. “It’s solely when one feels the emotion that one can authentically categorical it,” she says. The slashes, burns, and repairs in her works emerge from private histories of loss and therapeutic, honouring vulnerability as a lot as resilience.
Intuition as type
This instinctive method to cloth mirrors the best way she reads Cummings’ poem; the affinity is extra non secular than literal. Radhika describes each poem and observe as unfolding “with a type of quiet inevitability, but with no inflexible construction… free, natural stitches, an openness to asymmetry, letting the soul and intuition information.”
An art work with Japanese kozo paper, machine embroidery, and acrylic paint
| Picture Credit score:
Particular Association
Finally, she hopes viewers go away with a way of the layered labour that relationships require. “They’re delicate,” she says, “and it is very important perceive every layer to assist them develop.”
In her fingers, indigo and embroidery grow to be vessels for reflection, care, and cultural reclamation — holding previous and current in the identical thread.
The exhibition is on until August 20, Monday to Saturday, 11am to 7 pm, at Artwork Alive, Gamal Abdel Nasser Marg, Block S, Panchsheel Park South, New Delhi.
Printed – August 14, 2025 11:40 am IST