Suchitra Mattai

Interview by Rebecca Hart

_Perhaps it was Suchitra Mattai’s experience living in many cultures and learning to adapt that fostered a hybrid conceptual studio practice. Her Guyanese heritage and immigrant experience have informed a rich visual language that merges colonial history, traditional painting, and idiosyncratic use of fiber. Using both the history of European and Indian art, she tells stories that have universal appeal because her images and installations hone close to the lived experience of so many. _

My own undergraduate studies focused on Islamic and South Asian art and later I earned an MFA in Fiber, so when I began to see Suchitra Mattai’s work around Denver I took note. Sugar Bound, her 2018 exhibition at Metropolitan State University, Denver, literally blew me away. There, paintings, collages, videos, murals, and installations sometimes stayed in the traditional bounds of these genres and other times broke loose with unexpected visual and conceptual energy. Her explorations continue to expand and have become all the more relevant. We sat down to speak in mid-May, 2020.

Rebecca Hart (RH): I’d like to start by asking you to talk about a recent painting like Demerara Dreams. It’s one of my favorites from this past year. Could you just walk us through what you intend that we see, what we actually see, and what are the thoughts or memories that inspired it?

Suchitra Mattai (SM): I think Demerara Dreams would be a great place to start. Demerara in the title names the region of Guyana that my family's from, both my mother's family and my father's family. It's the capital and it has significance in that way. It is also the place where I was born. The title Demerara Dreams is about dreaming of a time when I was there, of history, of a memory. It’s a reflection on one of my earliest memories. I remember the lush vegetation in Guyana. Much of Guyana is rainforest. The indentured laborers and British colonialists live on the Atlantic Ocean coast but the interior is all rainforest. I chose the tropical print fabric for the painting to reflect the experience of the lush, the green, the tropical.

Starting with an embedded pattern allows me to conceal and reveal information. I chose a commercial pattern, an interpretation of what "tropical" is from a Western context, which allows me to control the viewer's experience by burying or revealing the narrative as much as I desire. It also allows the figures to be uniquely integrated into the composition.

I used a Polaroid photo of me from the 70's and my mother's sari, and that inspired me to paint my portrait as a child, peeking out from behind her skirt. With the sari, my mother is there, her presence is felt, which signals a sense of comfort. My intention was to make a psychological painting: one of intimacy but also of fear. Maybe it's a fear of the unknown. I immigrated as a young child, so there's a sense of what might be and what is unknown.

RH: I always felt like you were hiding as well as kind of playing in her skirts.

SM: Yes, there is that too. I think it’s layered because there are also photos with me and my cousins playing hide-and-seek in the foliage. As you can imagine, it was a great place to play in the gardens. There's an element of play as well. I'm open to the viewer having these sort of complex emotions and understandings. Including a child in the image, already sort of associates the painting with innocence and play. I started with play and as I developed the composition, I extrapolated other emotions.

RH: So in that painting, you have an actual sari but you, the child, are wearing western dress. Can you talk about that?

SM: In the Caribbean, Indian immigrants wear both Western and South Asian garb. More often than not, you'll see women wearing Western garb on a daily basis but for rituals, such as weddings or special occasions, the saris come out. I recreated an everyday moment but the sari worn by my mother acts as a cultural marker. That's why I combined my western dress with my mother’s garb.

A lot that comes with living in a colony, and migrating for that matter, is about assimilation and adaptation. Like many immigrants, one wants to assimilate, but you're also required to in some ways. For example, my family only speaks English even though I grew up hearing Hindi in other cultural contexts. My parents really wanted to keep their culture alive and instill a sense of what it is to be Indian. Because we were in a British colony, we couldn't speak our native tongue. In order to find employment, one had to speak English.

RH: Guyana has a gravitational pull, and Demerara is not only the capital, it's the name of the sugar. Will you tell me a little bit about the symbolism of the name Demerara? Is it a location, is it a lifestyle?

SM: It's a bit of both. Originally my family was from India, from Northeast India in Uttar Pradesh near the Himalayas. They were brought or enticed to go to Guyana as indentured laborers. The contract included bondage for five years in exchange for a plot of land. After the required time and service, you could take passage back home to India instead. My paternal grandfather and his parents went back to India after serving the five years. They were of a lower class in India. One of my interesting stories is that after they took the boat back, they realized that there were certain freedoms that they could have if they stayed in Guyana but not in India. They later made the voyage all the way back to Guyana. The passage from India to the west was on small, cramped boats. It's quite fascinating that they would go back home and then return to Guyana at that level of peril. I think this is telling about how impoverished they were.

RH: Did your family eventually get land?

SM: Yes, yes. The research on my own family is difficult. I need to make a trip back to Guyana and view the original documents surrounding their arrivals. I've seen documents of other families and found what I can gather from the British Archives, etc.

Demerara is the name of the sugar produced in Guyana as well. Africans (through slavery) and South Asians and East Asians (through indentured labor) were brought to work on sugar and rice plantations, so Demerara identifies the place and the reason for the labor.

Demerara Dreams, 2019

Ggouache, acrylic, and Mother's sari on printed fabric

66 x 52 in.

RH: That’s fascinating and we’ll pick up on this again. Before that, you were really kind to send me a couple of images of your graduate work. In Orange I saw abstract geometric imagery with long forced perspectives that was paired with traditional textile patterning. In some instances, it was actually Asian textile patterning—clouds, tiger bands, etc.—that appear on imperial textiles from China and India. They may help me understand how your work developed. Can you talk a little bit about how you evolved that imagery, and then how you moved away from it?

SM: As you know, my practice is rooted in the piecing together of disparate parts into a singular whole. When I applied to grad school my portfolio work was figurative. Once I got there, I wanted to learn a new language. I wanted to develop a new vocabulary, but still use some of the elements that have always been with me. I've always been interested in textiles and patterns so I sensed that using these various references in my work created a palimpsest that reflected my homes and travels. Indian saris and textiles were around my home and offered solace and a reference point. I also looked at Japanese woodblocks and studied Islamic ornament. It was through abstraction that I was able to combine these very diverse elements.

I see the graduate work as similar to what I'm doing now because I often combine found elements from multiple sources. In graduate school there was definitely something more meditative and drifting towards the unknown within that body of work. The threads that carry into my current work are my desire to communicate something about the “global,” what it is to be an immigrant, and what it feels like to be displaced and disoriented.

RH: In that work there was a tension between the hidden and the revealed. There's a sense of time and travel in the long forced perspectives, the low horizon lines, which I sense is a through line to your work now. I'm thinking of Sugar Water, the video installation, water images projected onto colonial furniture that looks like it's just been shipwrecked or scattered.

SM: I really wanted to develop a sense of what displacement feels like. The furniture in Sugar Water is hung at different angles to create a sense of disorientation. Threads emanate from the volumes and videos project onto surfaces. The environment is disconcerting but filled with past narratives and modern day myths.

The imagery that I use in installations like Sugar Water are videos that I collect as I travel. I think about migration and movement, and I try to incorporate them into larger projects. So much of my work is about combinations and permutations, whether it be through combining patterns, or combining materials. The videos become another material within the work. In a way, it brings the terrain, the landscape, back into the work.

I made one of the videos in Sugar Water on the middle passage crossing from Ghana to Rio knowing that it would be integral to my work. The video projected on the dresser and mirror was collected on the middle passage.

RH: So that was personal research, to take the middle passage?

SM: It was serendipitous. I taught on a program that took me by ship around the world. I took lots of videos during that time.

RH: That's fascinating because I'm thinking now of Imperfect Isometries, and the video component of it was taken of borders, right?

SM: Yes, but that project and its video were more specific. I traveled to the Israeli-Palestinian border; I traveled to the US-Mexico border: borders that I felt were charged politically and socially. I made video of the actual walls. I also integrated video of prison walls. I felt that there was a connection between how we think of walls, how we think of borders, and how we think of human interaction and social separation. The connections between the videos that I collected through travel, and those specific border videos, address my interest in landscape and identity.

Sugar Water, 2018

Found furniture, video, string

Dimensions variable

RH: I feel that although your work is representational, there's a level of conceptual abstraction in every work. I'm fascinated by the fact that you use a lot of found imagery. There’s a latent or inherent content, and then in another sense is stripped away, altered, or subverted because your concept is layered over it. For instance, could we talk about Calypso Queen?

SM: In Calypso Queen, I wanted to create a Caribbean heroine, a sort of celebration of a Caribbean woman. The designation calypso is a reference to the music I grew up listening to—in addition to Bollywood, we listened to Calypso. In making this work (and all of my work), I want the figures and the characters to be every-person, to be universal, but at the same time I understand that I can only tell my specific story, and that's what I try to do. I used a photo of a relative to create her image. I also used a found rug that has European Baroque characteristics.

I'm not sure of the period of the design of the rug, but I know it's a vintage object. I had that rug in my studio for quite a while. Sometimes I have objects lying around. I wait until I have an inspiration or conceptual reason for how to use them. The idea of having a vintage rug concealing part of the figure, but revealing her as well, was really interesting to me as a device—as a tool, for thinking about invisibility.

The other aspect that I wanted to investigate was the theater of carnival in the Caribbean. The costuming and glitz that happens for just that one moment was essential in creating this Caribbean heroine. She's there, she's celebrated, but she's also hidden by colonial presence.

I think the process of concealing and revealing is about power. Giving power to the figure. Giving power to the artist. I have a sense of controlling what the viewer sees and it gives power to the figure. In Calypso Queen the woman has power but a portion of her face is also concealed by embroidery threads. So you can see her as a form, as a woman, as a brown woman, yet some of her face, her essence is obscured. She's still masked, she's still voiceless in a certain way. I think this idea of power; it's a complicated and complex idea. I've asked myself many times when I create various colonial conditioned figures, 'Why do they need to be partially masked? Why are they obscured?' My response is that it’s about controlling the viewer's perception of the woman, about hiding some part of her, of restricting her agency to reveal what she chooses.

RH: Is that hiding a commentary on being silenced, or is it a commentary of not fully entering in?

SM: I think it's about both. There's a history of silencing, right? There's a history both in East Indian culture and Western Culture, everywhere: women are silenced. There's no doubt about that. When I depict these figures, I think that I can celebrate women while still giving a nod to the past and what that was like—because my work is about reinvention, considering the past while shaping the present and future.

RH: In Hindu tradition do women veil?

SM: No, they're not veiled. They wear saris. You cover your head in public or at temple but you don't have to cover all the time. There is a partial, let's say, masking. And there's a celebration of the demure.

RH: So there's also this sense, and I think you used this word, of revealing. In Calypso Queen there are gold sequins on the rug as it's folded back, and the figure is surrounded with sort of a field of beads.

SM: I've also incorporated thread and embroidery. Much of my work incorporates domestic practices, or what were once domestic practices, the practices of that controlled or inhibited women. I'm interested in fiber and fiber-based materials. I use thread in this particular image to mask the female face but the other materials bring in the sense of making, the domestic, and the handmade. The beads and sequins allude to Carnival.

"I've asked myself many times when I create various colonial conditioned figures, 'Why do they need to be partially masked? Why are they obscured?' My response is that it’s about controlling the viewer's perception of the woman, about hiding some part of her, of restricting her agency to reveal what she chooses."

RH: That’s interesting because cloth does heavy lifting. Can you talk a little bit about that?

SM: Yes. I use the found materials because I want to collaborate with makers of the past. The artists who made fiber-based domestic artwork did so anonymously. They weren't celebrated art stars. Using domestic materials gives the makers, in a contemporary art sense, a sense of value. I think it allows me to communicate and have that dialogue with the past.

One of my grandmothers was a seamstress and my other grandmother made all of her own clothes. My mother sewed, macraméd, and crocheted. I learned to crochet when I was five. I remember making a huge blanket for my sister who was born when I was eight. I designed and sewed some of my own clothes, so this is very much a part of my tradition. That's why I feel so excited and elated to be able to incorporate these craft-based processes into the work that I do every day.

RH: You're really talking about functional sewing, yet a lot of the textiles you use are actually ladies’ handiwork.

SM: Yes, I often incorporate vintage domestic needlepoint and embroideries that have been made in the home purportedly by women into my larger works. Were they making them because needlepoint stitching was their only path towards creativity, or are they making them just because they needed to fill time, or possibly check out? Perhaps they needed a meditative moment. Regardless of their motivations I feel close to the makers. I am in dialogue with them through their work.

Calypso Queen, 2019

Acrylic and mixed-media

76 x 64 in.

RH: You're using textiles that other women have made and the found imagery on them; that's very different from what you do when you weave saris into tapestry.

SM: The tapestries really started with the Sharjah project, with Imperfect Isometry. I aspired to connect the essence of women who are part of the Indian diaspora. When I went to Sharjah, I wanted a way to celebrate the large population of South Asian people living there. Making a very large tapestry was an ode, a monumental ode, to those people and specifically to the women with whom I share kinship. It was important to me to use saris sourced from India, from Sharjah, and from my own family. As I started making the tapestry panels, my mother's friends, people I know, would send me saris. Through time and place, it became a way of connecting women from a particular culture. When you migrate, you essentially lose a sense of the collective community, and a lot of what you know as community dissipates. My desire to connect all these women comes from my own desire to connect back to a “home.”

When I use saris, I cut them into strips and then weave them into tapestries. They combine in a way so that they are un-differentiated. You can see parts but they become like a community. That’s very different than using found work with imagery already there. Much of the found work has imagery of a pastoral or baroque nature. I appropriate this imagery in order to convey aspects of colonialism. I complicate the pastoral landscapes and re-contextualize female portraits.

RH: Those tapestries are massive. Can you talk a little bit about scaling your work? It ranges from making the equivalent of a miniature book illustration to massive textiles that are architecturally scaled.

SM: Yes, my work differs dramatically in scale. With the smaller work, I'm able to move through ideas quickly, and convey something intimate. I remember going to India the first time and seeing the temples—these old, beautiful temples which I had only seen in books. The idea of artisans making those large-scale architectural monuments across the world really affected me.

People working on a small scale producing objects that are joined to become a massive whole interests me. So when I make work that’s large in scale, I often create small parts that become part of the whole. I'm really excited to expand the scale of my work to a greater degree. The large scale works have been mostly fiber based. Right now I'm interested in taking my paintings and other two-dimensional work to a much larger scale as well.

RH: That's fascinating. I was thinking about when you talk about Hindu temples, and I'm thinking also maybe of Jain Temples: of how the stone carving is so intricate that it's like a piece of lace.

SM: I think that is a really good observation because I still want to have evidence of the hand even on a large scale.

"Regarding feminism, I sense that when I'm making an artwork there are obvious references to 'women’s work,' handmade craft processes, and women's garb. There is a sense of empowerment that I'm alluding to. When I include heroines, these celebrated women, and everyday girls in my work, there's a conversation around them that addresses a history of oppression. There’s also a voice, an optimism about the inherent power that they have. I see my practice as a feminist practice, and I see it as a post-colonial practice."

RH: You use vectors, isometric three dimensional drawings, and other geometric shapes within landscapes, and you call the Sharjah project Imperfect Isometries. I'm just curious about this because they are the theoretic signs of calculus and physics. Can you talk a little bit about that, and why they might be interpreted literally, or maybe not so literally?

SM: I have a past in mathematics. My BA is in statistics, and I spent a lot of time studying probability theory, calculus, linear geometry, etc. When I shifted to the humanities, I thought I would never use any of it again. But it's definitely a part of my psyche. The geometric constructs become an opening, a kind of physical and conceptual disruption in some of the scapes that I use.

There's a certain conceptual ambiguity in higher level probability theory that interests me. I'm experimenting with how to incorporate that into some of the work. I think that of the needlepoints with linear elements, again, reflect a way of incorporating something that doesn't feel quite right, a foreign body, an uneasiness, so to speak. This is how people feel within a new cultural landscape.

RH: That’s interesting bringing in the disruptive element as personal. I'm curious whether you can talk more about feminism, and post-colonial practice, which aren’t necessarily connected but each upsets hegemonic norms. Are there theories that you are working with or against, or are there favorite ideas that you have?

SM: Yes. Actually, there's a scholar, Edouard Glissant (I was recently introduced to him through a curator that I'm working with for another project). He's a scholar of the Caribbean, thinking about passages from Africa and Asia to the West, the Caribbean, and South America. He talks about the Baroque—and I’ve been trying to understand my own obsession with the Baroque.

Recently, for the Sharjah project, I read a lot of Marcus Garvey, Edward Said, etc. The research fed the work in various ways, ways that are tangible and intangible. I definitely think about post-colonial theory writ large. When I make, I try very much to make privileging intuition. I have a studio and art history background. After I left the art history graduate program at Penn and decided to pursue an MFA, I approached studio practice without the freedom that I have now. There was a certain point not too long ago when I decided that I wanted to just work intuitively. This doesn't mean that I don't read or think or research, it just means that when I make, I allow my intuition to hold an important place, to drive the making.

Regarding feminism, I sense that when I'm making an artwork there are obvious references to "women’s work," handmade craft processes, and women's garb. There is a sense of empowerment that I'm alluding to. When I include heroines, these celebrated women, and everyday girls in my work, there's a conversation around them that addresses a history of oppression. There’s also a voice, an optimism about the inherent power that they have. I see my practice as a feminist practice, and I see it as a post-colonial practice. I'm very interested in the period, late 1800s, mid-to-late 1800s, early 1900s, when my family left India. I'm interested in how Colonialism shaped not just my family's history but the history of people from all over.

Imperfect Isometry

Woven vintage saris

8 x 45 ft.

Imperfect Isometry

Multi media installation (vintage sari tapestries, video of border and prison walls, merry go round)

Dimensions variable

RH: These histories are fascinating, so let's talk about your choice of imagery. The figures that you use, except for portraits of yourself, the women that you depict often are types. You portray a Hindu beauty, a Mughal princess, or a colonial woman. They are stereotypes but I don't think that you as a feminist really believe that. Are they a discursive tool?

SM: Using the universal allows me to break down stereotypes. When I use a figure that is Indian, let's say, I mask the figure or erase the figure in some way. To me it's a sort of deconstruction of what that figure means, what it symbolizes, what content it brings. If you repeat the stereotype in slightly different iterations every time, than you use a universal language or image but it is always changing, therefore you're asserting the uniqueness of the feminine or the individual.

RH: I'm also curious about Wedded Bliss (image at the top of this page) because it appears as if you discovered the figures in Western textile patterning, but the figures themselves have turbans and jewels, and yet they're there but they aren't. Can you talk about presence and absence, and maybe a little bit about camouflage?

SM: I mentioned that I use a lot of found patterns. I feel as though the patterns themselves bring meaning and reference certain historic or cultural periods. When I use the tropical patterns, it becomes very much about Western interpretations about what “the tropical” is. Sometimes the patterns and fabrics are contemporary and sometimes they reflect historical ways of viewing.

The particular pattern for Wedded Bliss is a sort of baroque European, imperial pattern. I wanted something that had the same body and weight as the fabrics that one wears during Hindu rituals. Those figures are adorned with what an Indian or a Hindu might wear today when they get married. It's what my husband and I wore when we got married. My universal statement with that work is layered. There's at once the sense of the Indian as an unknown, muted presence in British Colonialism. On a personal note, I used images of my parents during their wedding to create that image. Much of my work tells stories about my own family, that which I know, and hopefully it speaks on a universal level. Yes, the figures are barely there. The trappings of what it means to be Indian, what it means to be Hindu, those trappings are there.

I got married in a Sanskrit ceremony but I don't know Sanskrit. Not many people do, but it just becomes a way of holding on. On one level, Wedded Bliss is about colonialism and the colonized within colonies. On another level, it's about what you lose and what you remember as you migrate. And it's about a holding on to a past that has shifted and changed into a present that is unknown, and a future that's unknown. Now back to the figures, some of them are actually taken from my family. We were laborers. When I put the women in more ornate dress, it's not so much about being “regal” as it is about donning formal dress for ceremonies and rituals. People of all classes wear special garb for special occasions. In Wedded Bliss, it's more about ceremony or ritual as a lens or means for thinking about more than just marriage. I guess there's a micro level and a macro level. On a micro level, it's about my own family, and also about the experience of an immigrant or indentured servant. On a macro level, I think when the viewer sees the work, it becomes so much about a powerlessness, an invisibility. With all of my work, it might start with a personal story that I hope will also be read on this macro scale.

"I feel as though the patterns themselves bring meaning and reference certain historic or cultural periods. When I use the tropical patterns, it becomes very much about Western interpretations about what 'the tropical' is. Sometimes the patterns and fabrics are contemporary and sometimes they reflect historical ways of viewing."

RH: That's one of the ways that artists connect with other people is using the particular to access the universal and reveal the singular. Something else is going on too. There's invisible labor and underground economies that allow western culture to produce its luxury items.

SM: So much of my family's history is about labor. I use my family history because it's part of a broader history of subjugation and invisibility. I didn't use those words when I talked about concealing and revealing images within the patterns but that's so much about what it is.

I made a work entitled Salvation Islands for my exhibition Sugar Bound, and the imagery within it was of a prison in the Guianas. It's not in British Guyana, but Dutch Guiana, Suriname. It is based on a prison that I researched on Devil’s Island where the laborers were sent if they didn't follow orders. The prison is partially hidden, it's partially there. What I choose to hide or show reflects on that sense of invisibility that surrounds labor both then and now.

I appreciated your last comment about Wedded Bliss, that “there's invisible labor and underground economies that allow Western culture to produce its luxury items” because it shows how speaking about the past can shape today’s important conversations.

Rebecca Hart

Rebecca Hart is the Vicki and Kent Logan curator at the Denver Art Museum. Her thirty-year long curatorial practice is grounded in efforts to connect artists to a wider public, often working with them to develop a critical vocabulary that informs their production.