Suchitra Mattai wields her fabric like a shaman wields their drum. As she weaves, fantastical forms emerge and the vibrations in the air slowly settle into a rhythmic heartbeat. Mattai then guides her sculptures, like spirits, through intangible realms, across land and sea, from the past to the present, and onward.
As a Guyanese American artist of South Asian descent who has lived in several countries, Mattai’s identity isn’t easy to categorize. This is evident in her work, which is neither ‘this’ nor ‘that.’ Not just a painting, though not singularly a sculpture either. Not strictly craft, but pushing the norms of ‘traditional’ fine art. Not solely fusing Caribbean and Indonesian cultures, but going beyond, creating something entirely new.
Mattai’s practice is multidisciplinary, but her favorite and perhaps most notable material of choice is the sari. Some of her saris are sourced directly from India, but many are thrifted by her mother and her mother’s friends from secondhand shops in New Jersey. Most of the materials she uses are found or repurposed, the history of the textile being equally as important as the history of the wearer. In that sense, the object never started with her. As she reworks the fabric, each with its own past, her practice becomes one of community and collaboration.
Through materiality and form, Mattai unravels the many historical narratives surrounding her identity: personal stories from her relatives, memories from her childhood, mythologies from each culture. She embeds these stories into her work as a way of archiving her ancestral past, simultaneously passing it down and reimagining it.
“I think of my whole practice as storytelling,” Mattai says. “I’m going back into my ancestral past and pulling out stories as a way of archiving those that aren’t documented in our Western history textbooks.” Perhaps it is this practice of summoning the past that leaves me unable to shake the idea of her as a sort of medium channeling ancient formulas. As an artist, she performs the role of both a storyteller and a conduit, guiding us between two planes of time. Again, I hear the beat of a ceremonial drum.
And so she weaves, braids, sews, embellishes. Her work takes many final forms—it could be hung on the wall like a tapestry, sewn together on the surface of a canvas like a painting, or (my personal favorite) built into a structure—a spatially rich sculptural installation.
Mattai’s 2024 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in San Francisco, titled she walked in reverse and found their songs, probed further into the intersection of memory and mythology. She became fascinated with the ancient practice of using a “memory palace”—a memorization technique that involves envisioning a familiar space, typically a house, and attaching ideas or mnemonic images to each room or object within the space. For this exhibition, Mattai brings her memory palace to life in the form of a large woven house made entirely of sari tapestries; it is a replica of her grandparent’s home in Guyana that she visited as a child. Upon first glance, the house appears to be floating, grounded to the floor only by long braids, which resemble legs, spilling out of each corner. Mattai tells me that those “legs” are referencing the stilts that the actual home sits on to protect against flooding since the land is below sea level.
Without a doorway or windows, the house is impenetrable. “I wanted it to be that way because that’s how I vaguely remember it, but memory is so fleeting,” Mattai tells me. Here, she embraces the slippage of memory, simultaneously untangling these recollections and reimagining them.
Surrounding the house are bits and pieces of a domestic space: the interior of her memory palace. She fuses found furniture with her soft sculptures, creating fanciful, elaborate rooms. And as these subjective, half-fabricated stories become memories, she subtly underscores how the same is done within historical narratives.
“I think mythology holds for us, as humans, all that we fear and all that we love,” Mattai says thoughtfully. “And if you take that apart, break it down, and then rebuild a new mythology, maybe we would have characters and stories that would speak to a more equitable future. As our collective consciousness changes, how do we create stories that align with that?”
As Mattai braids her saris, I hear the boxy resonance of a frame drum. Slowly, the fabric morphs together forming a thick braid, which expands further creating a giant woven wall. Another braid wraps around itself until it becomes a large mass surging with life. The thrumming grows louder. Suddenly, the fabric has grown into an entity, the shimmery reverberating of her drum filling up the air around it. Pulsating. There is an unmistakable energy within her spirit-like sculptures. Yes, I’m sure. They are alive.
Image Credits:
Hero: Suchitra Mattai, a self portrait, 2024 (detail). Worn saris, dried grass, found pendant, ribbon, beaded trim, and synthetic hair. Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy the artist, Roberts Projects, and ICA San Francisco
(L): Suchitra Mattai, memory palace, 2024. Installation view of she walks in reverse and found their songs, ICA San Francisco, June 5 to September 15, 2024. Found South Asian processional umbrella, braided saris, woven saris, found furniture, tassels, beaded trim, gold rope, video. Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy the artist, Roberts Projects, and ICA San Francisco
(R): Suchitra Mattai, Pappy’s house, 2024. Installation view of she walks in reverse and found their songs, ICA San Francisco, June 5 to September 15, 2024. Worn saris, aluminum, beaded trim, tinsel. Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy the artist, Roberts Projects, and ICA San Francisco
(L): Suchitra Mattai, she walked in reverse and found their songs, 2024 (detail). Found tapestry, embroidery floss, beads, bindis, sari, and faux gems. Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy the artist, Roberts Projects, and ICA San Francisco
(M): Suchitra Mattai, Pappy’s house, 2024 (detail). Worn saris, aluminum, beaded trim, tinsel. Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy the artist, Roberts Projects, and ICA San Francisco
(R): Suchitra Mattai, and the world swallowed us whole, 2023 (detail). Mixed media. Collection of Ethan Beard and Wayee Chu. Photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy the artist, Roberts Projects, and ICA San Francisco