Leonardo Bravo:
Hello, this is Leonardo Bravo with Kaleidoscopic here from Berlin. Today I'm doing an interview with a wonderful artist, Suchitra Mattai, who is now based out of Los Angeles and whose work I've been following for the last year or so. I was drawn to the multidisciplinary aspect of your practice and the way you approach your subject matter, your own cultural history, and histories of migration that I think are so powerful. As an immigrant myself from Chile they truly resonated with me so I'm delighted to have this conversation. I thought we could start by hearing an overview of your practice and your journey as well as, as an artist.
Suchitra Mattai:
Well, thank you so much for that. Yes, I've lived all over the world and I was born in Guyana, so in South America, technically like you! And because of a desire for education, my parents moved to Nova Scotia, Canada.
Leonardo Bravo:
Oh, amazing. Yeah, quite different from Guyana I would imagine.
Suchitra Mattai:
Yes. Very different. I remember experiencing my first snow and how intense that was coming from such a tropical place, but then we moved to the States, and as an adult I've lived in India and abroad, and France, etc. And then throughout the United States, mostly on the East Coast, and more recently in Denver and LA. So all of those travels and experiences have really informed my practice. I think the heart of my practice is giving voice and telling these stories of people like my family members. My great-grandparents were from India. All of my family is from India originally (from Uttar Pradesh (EP) ) but when slavery was abolished in the Caribbean basically the British wanted another labor force, right?
Suchitra Mattai:
I'm sure you know this, but they looked to India, their biggest colony, for people to work on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. There were a lot of people in eastern UP who knew how to work sugar and rice plantations so that's kind of where the bulk of people, the South Asians that are living in Guyana and the Caribbean, are from. So I think about those migrations, those ocean migrations of my family. The idea was that they would come to Guyana to be indentured laborers and then after five years be given a plot of land or passage back to India. And so it's kind of interesting because many people chose to stay.
Suchitra Mattai:
And that's really because of the caste system, right? In India. And so they had this kind of, even though they were lowly in the colonies, they still had this escape route from the caste system. Anyway, so all these things inform my practice. And I would say my practice is deeply rooted in intuition. The way I make and create all of my mixed-media work is really kind of through an intuitive process. Obviously I use a lot of found materials and many of them relate to the domestic. And, I'm trying to give voice to women, to people who are from the Caribbean, from India, especially women. I think about the labor of the domestic sphere and how to celebrate that. And so my materials range from vintage saris worn by women from all over the world, to found objects. And I'm trained as a painter and that's kind of the heart of my practice in a way.
Leonardo Bravo:
I sensed that!
Suchitra Mattai:
Yes. But even when I make textiles, the large fiber installations, it's sort of a painterly process. I think of them as painterly in a certain way. So yes, I'm basically here now in LA, new to LA and really excited about my practice and the expansion of my practice. I'm very excited about where my practice is right now, and the kind of learning that I'm doing. I’d say it's an intuitive practice, but one always devoted to experimentation.
Leonardo Bravo:
Let me just ask you a bit more about the family history, because I see in your work these beautiful formal concerns in terms of forms and shapes and colors, materials being interwoven, interlaced almost. And it's exactly what you were talking about these family histories. Of migrations going back generations, and also the complications, the tensions, the way in which identity gets blurred, mixed up, becomes hybrid, becomes something else. There's an attachment to a cultural origin but also it gets attached to something else. It's interesting, myself coming from South America, I've been formed by mestizaje, the mixing of the European and the Indigenous, and many other ancient cultural sources, which carries through me. So that notion of understanding the fluidity and the ability to wrap yourself around these multiplicities, I find that your work speaks to me profoundly about that.
Suchitra Mattai:
Well, thank you! I think this position in a way has made me an outsider, you know, but there's also a kind of freedom in that, you know?
Leonardo Bravo:
Yes!!
Suchitra Mattai:
Yes, and I think that it is a very complex history because, on face value, a lot of other South Asians think I'm South Asian American, and I am historically, and there are many things that carry over, but language is one of those things that doesn't. And so there's this kind of inability to communicate with the home, the people of the homeland in a certain way. And I always had this desire to connect, not just back to the Caribbean, but back to India. And so when I've been, I always feel like an outsider there too, right? So there's this kind of position that makes for a really interesting kind of liminal space to exist within. As an artist, I've actually found some freedom in that. And of course, as a young person there were great struggles, right? To think about these dualities and yes. more than dualities. There are so many layers, right?
Leonardo Bravo:
It's all stacked and layered!
Suchitra Mattai:
It's like from everywhere and it's kind of disorienting, and that's part of what informs my practice, I think, too, conceptually. I mean, that's what I think about a lot.
Leonardo Bravo:
So what drew you to be an artist and maybe your inspirations along the way?
Suchitra Mattai:
So I have wanted to be an artist pretty much my whole life. And coming from an immigrant family like mine it was really not something that was supported. Across the board artists have this problem with their families, you know, it's just one of those things, right? People don't understand. And so I wanted to go to art school. I wanted to do all these things, and that is not what I did at first. So I actually have a degree in statistics.
Leonardo Bravo:
Something very practical..
Suchitra Mattai:
So yes, I did that for my dad. And basically I kept feeling like, how am I gonna do this? I don't even know how to be an artist. I don't have role models for this. There's no representation in museums. Like, you don't even know if you can be the thing, right? So in my twenties, I had this love affair with India. And so I went to actually study Indian art, contemporary Indian art. And so I thought, if I'm studying art, at least I'm thinking about it, it's within me. It's like near me. I'm studying the history of these objects. And then one day I was in a class and I thought to myself -- just do it. Just do the thing. And, in undergrad I was double majoring in art so I had accrued many studio credits, enough to apply to graduate school. And so I went to grad school for painting and drawing and studied at UPenn in Philadelphia. And it was like everything opening up for me, just these possibilities. It was blissful to finally be doing THE thing.
Leonardo Bravo:
I was reading up on you and saw that you had taken a little bit of a gap it seemed from your practice, and now the way it's accelerated perhaps over the last couple of years. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Suchitra Mattai:
Yes. I mean, there are many reasons for that. When I was younger after graduate school, I was making paintings and in a way I felt that I wasn't encouraged to use the kinds of materials and processes that I wanted to use and that I was using before I came to school. So even when I did all those other degrees I was always making art always, in my little apartments and whatnot. But there was a time when I was basically trying to fit into this western historical narrative that wasn't really working for me. I felt like my paintings were really distilled and they didn't have the life that I wanted them to have. But in addition, on a personal level, I had children. I raised two sons with my husband. I was also very sick, so there was a long period of illness. And so when I finally came out of that, I decided that I wanted to spend every single day doing exactly what I wanted to do.
Suchitra Mattai:
And that is really how my practice had this renaissance and rebirth in a way. And since that point, I literally just get up every day and do the thing that I want to do, whatever makes sense for me. And it's a great exploration. And it's a kind of great joy to be able to do it in this way. Cause I didn't think I would be able to. That's how my practice had that gap and is now in the place where it is.
Leonardo Bravo:
That's so beautiful. It just resonates with me as I trained as a painter and studied with great people, great mentors in graduate school. But as my work has evolved over the last 15 years, what's really driving it now are the memories and visual imprints that I had as a young child in the south of Chile. And those are the things that drive the work, the textiles, the stories, the folklore, the myths of Indigeneity in the south of Chile. There's such power in that innate way to communicate something that's deeper than anything else.
Suchitra Mattai:
Totally.
Suchitra Mattai:
And similar for me, surrounded by south Asian textiles and culture, movies, everything. It feels like I am in the right place. It feels authentic to me. Right. It feels like this is my thing, and to not run from it, or kind of push it aside to fit into something else. Now I feel like I am really getting at what is important for me, similar to you. And I think also part of it is material when thinking about how to kind of reimagine these western historical spaces and narratives in ways that could be inclusive. It's through the materials that new forms are generated for me. It's true materiality. And also through privileging, oral tales and storytelling.
Suchitra Mattai:
Stories are a big part of it!
Leonardo Bravo:
Going back to the layering, because with oral histories, the way they're passed on, there's always a richness to it, a layering compared to more traditional western narratives that rely on a kind of linear way of mapping the world.
Suchitra Mattai:
Yes. I remember my grandfather would tell these stories and they would just wander along, and you had to stay with it. You know, he was a dairy farmer but at a small scale, he literally delivered his milk on a bicycle. Like, wow. You know? And he would chat with everybody in his village. It is just funny because he'd tell me these stories about this person and that person, and you would just have to stay with it. But it was so rich and layered, like you're saying, and it was very non-linear!
Leonardo Bravo:
You just had a very successful exhibition at Kavi Gupta Gallery in Chicago. Tell us about the work you made for that and how it was received. It seems that this felt like a real moment at this point for you.
Suchitra Mattai:
Yeah. The show is still up so it's very fresh. It opened in November and it's called Osmosis. There are many layers to this project and to the materials. There's a vast array of materials and mediums, everything from sculpture to large scale fiber art to painting, to collage. There's quite a diversity, which is kind of characteristic of my work. But for this show what drove it in a way was this idea again, of ocean migrations. I used salt and the idea of osmosis as a starting point. And thinking about salt as an instigator for motion and movement with water. I use that as kind of the kernel of the story.
Suchitra Mattai:
But it was also inspired by a story about this place in South India called Mahabalipuram. During the tsunami in southeast Asia and South Asia, that part of India was very affected. There's a myth that the tide went out and revealed this whole temple complex and the fishermen saw it and talked about it, but it disappeared really quickly and no one ever saw it again. And so there's this mythic moment. And it was really interesting to me because this whole kind of thinking about one's history and story is very mythic in a way. It's like a book. It's generated from memory, from images, from stories. And I wanted to create an exhibition that kind of captured that spirit.
Suchitra Mattai:
In terms of the exhibition design, I used the design of a Hindu temple as an orchestration or the morphology of a Hindu temple to think about how to design it. So when you walk through the space, the kind of niches that you find on the outside of the temple and the inside are kind of lining the main wall. And they're made from a sculpture that I got in India about 25 years ago. And it was the muse in a way for the exhibition. So there are these niches and the artwork, the smaller textiles sit within those niches, and then as you move through the space, the most sacred place is the garbhagriha in the back.
Suchitra Mattai:
And all the icons are always in the back. And that's the most sacred space. So as you move through the exhibition and you get to this back space, you find a temple that is partly revealed, partly concealed, partly destroyed, partly created and it's made of salt. And so the sculptures as well in the niches are made of salt. And then there's a salt drawing that surrounds the temple as well as fiber. And so basically this work is intended to capture a sense of the mythic, how we kind of start unpacking and thinking about art history. And what happens when these things degrade, you know, become deconstructed, and rebuilt…and what identity can be in this sort of day and age with such a rich history that we all have. How do we think, how do we create this sense of identity from these disparate backgrounds, like you mentioned earlier.
Leonardo Bravo:
I wanted to ask you about a couple of individual pieces, but also was intrigued about the way you use these various moves or approaches. Some of the works having more figurative elements and some of the works are woven textile and fiber based. And they occupy that space, that pictorial space, plane, it's almost a painterly plane. How do you make those decisions on how to operate within those pictorial dimensions you're operating.
Suchitra Mattai:
I think at the heart of it, there's this kind of tenet for me that different stories need to be told in different ways. I think that with the figuration, in a way a lot of the figuration for me comes from old photographs, right? Of my family and whatnot. And so there's a moment of honoring specific people and specific places that happens maybe in the figurative work.
Suchitra Mattai:
It also happens in the more abstract work, but in a different way. The large scale tapestries, for example, are all made of vintage saris. I've gathered them from India, from my family, my mom's friends, etc. And then I weave them together and that really becomes like a bringing together, and it becomes a monument. Those become monuments in themselves. But I think there are different ways to tell a story. There are different ways to show reverence and share these stories. And that's why I move between these different and disparate materials and between abstraction and figuration.
Leonardo Bravo:
What's been the reaction to the exhibit?
Suchitra Mattai:
I've gotten really interesting feedback. Really exciting feedback. I think the large scale tapestries are always exciting for people. It's the first time also that I'm showing a figurative large scale tapestry, it moves between abstraction and figuration. And then of course the temple. In this exhibition I have more monumentally sized and monumental work than I've had before, and I think the conversation between scale, between figuration abstraction, there's this kind of excitement that I feel like people are reading from it. And I'm really excited by the responses.
Leonardo Bravo:
I just wanted to touch on an individual piece that really spoke to me. It's from 2022 "Herself as Another". If you can share a little bit about it.
Suchitra Mattai:
I kind of go through these family albums and I meditate sort of on different people and their stories. So that work is about a particular aunt of mine who actually passed away quite young, and I wanted to tell the story of her relationship to me, and this absence/presence that she invokes. I wanted that to be very much a part of the story. So that's the specific story but overall that painting was a part of an exhibition called Herself as Another and it was this idea of thinking about yourself as another, like really embracing this idea of outsider, the outsider status, and what that feels like and how that reads for other people.
Leonardo Bravo:
The more we're talking Suchitra, I think so much about this notion of absence and presence and what memory creates or forms in our minds, this sense of longing and the phantom quality of what that longing is. We remember it either through the way it was told to us or the imaginary that we construct of it versus the reality. The absence, the presence, the actual presence of the thing. So those dualities, those tensions, as you're talking about the work, I see it more and more.
Suchitra Mattai:
Well, I appreciate that, because yes in that particular work, there's that sort of absent figure, there's a presence in the kind of silhouette of that figure with pattern, It really is kind of doing in a way what you were talking about, I hope, that sense of belonging in a way, but then also of not belonging. And so there are always dualities. That's something, yeah, you'll find in my work.
Leonardo Bravo:
So in the shift to Los Angeles from Denver, how is LA treating you right now?
Suchitra Mattai:
I think that as my practice has grown and expanded, I feel that feedback is an important part of that and community, and I feel as though the community here is receptive to the kind of work I make. And it's a lot easier being in a bigger city, especially like LA, to have studio visits, to meet other artists that are in dialogue with the kind of work that I make. So I've been here just since July and I was kind of burrowed in my studio making the work for Osmosis, and now that I've kind of come alive again, come out of my studio, I've been meeting new people and it's just been really fabulous.
Leonardo Bravo:
It's always fascinating to think about LA and what does it mean to be in community there as things happen in a way at the hyper-local level because the scale of the place is so enormous. To think about how to create that sense of community and community building, community bridging in terms of the scale of the place. In that sense, connected to your work, because there's such richness in terms of the way stories are being told, the way you're reclaiming your history, your family history — how are people relating to that? Have you had conversations around that and how are people connecting or relating to the work at that level?
Suchitra Mattai:
Yeah, it's been very much a surprise to me in a way, because you have to realize like when you've made most of the work that you've made and been in kind of void, in a space where you're not sharing the work or where you're not taking in other perspectives, it's a very solitary experience and also you really don't know how people are going to react. And so now that I have more exhibitions and opportunities, it really warms my heart because feeling like an outsider all these years, and then sharing the work and having responses by people like yourself who respond to, at the core to this sense of what it's like to be an immigrant and even though my stories are are specific…
Suchitra Mattai:
I feel as though I'm getting responses across the board from all sorts of people, you know? There's the immigrant experience but there's also the experience of people who have been making fiber art for a long time and who weren't included. So I get a lot of feedback and I'm really touched by it all. It's just been kind of amazing because in a way it's a risk to tell your specific story. And it's also a risk because it's a deeply personal place, but also, can people relate to it? That's the question. And so, yeah, I've been getting really interesting and positive, really exciting responses and it really warms my heart.
Leonardo Bravo:
Something you said about the way you recognize or amplify the sense what female labor is through the work, what female craft represents, and that there's this notion of weaving and crafting and textile work traditionally thought as female work. I see this kind of shift in appreciation and re centering and an actual recognition of the values embedded in this type of work. I imagine you're very conscious and aware of that in your practice.
Suchitra Mattai:
Yes. It's really kind of fantastic. I've been interested in making this kind of work and been making it since I was a child. My grandmothers taught me all this stuff, how to sew and embroider and all this stuff. And here it is, it's the moment, it's like the fiber art moment. And it's wonderful, you know, because it's work, it's women's work, not just women's work but mostly women's work, in the domestic sphere. And it's just very liberating to see it being recognized in this way and treated in a non- hierarchical way.
Leonardo Bravo:
I was gonna ask you, what's inspiring you right now? Especially after such an ambitious exhibition to take some major downtime and recharge.
Suchitra Mattai:
Yeah. I mean, there are so many things right now. I'm also, uh, producing a movie,
Leonardo Bravo :
Whoaa!
Suchitra Mattai:
A short film. Yes. My husband has written and directed a film that takes place in India. And it's such a beautiful movie. So that's something that's really inspiring me right now, and yeah, that's something my whole family is kind of like fully engaged in and supportive with.
Suchitra Mattai:
I’m also reading “What we feed to the Manticore” by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri who creates a new folklore. All of the stories are told from animals’ perspectives and I feel the stories collapse time. The last thing I want to say is that I'm excited to be in LA for exploration and seeing, there's so much art here. And I think, like finding other artists again, like the community aspect, I'm really excited for that as well.
Leonardo Bravo:
Well Suchitra it's been a treat and I so appreciate your time and so happy to have this opportunity to feature your work on Kaleidoscopic. I will actually be back in LA for a few months and would love the opportunity to meet in person and do a studio visit then.
Suchitra Mattai:
Well, I totally appreciate getting to know you and your work. And I am just thankful and grateful to be a part of your project. We will definitely set up a time to meet in LA soon.
Leonardo Bravo:
Yes. And we'll do that studio visit and we'll do a little cafecito in LA for sure.
IG: @suchitramattaiart