A shaggy curtain of stitched fabric and cotton tassels hangs diagonally across Sayan Chanda’s new studio in northeast London. The work has the presence of a being—perhaps a deity “who dwells within trees,” as the work’s title indicates—with elongated eyes in the form of vertical slits through the fabric. Like the imposing, sculptural textile works by some of Chanda’s forebears, including Mrinalini Mukherjee and Magdalena Abakanowicz, it anchors the space like an idol in a temple.
Up close, Who Dwells Within Trees (2025) reveals itself to be composed of hand-stripped fragments of kantha, a traditional Bengali quilted textile passed down matrilineally. This kantha was repaired, restored, and adorned many times before coming into the hands of the Kolkata-born artist, who then unpicked its layers. Amid the dense fringe of deep indigo and black, we see loose blue and magenta threads unearthed from within the textile—elements that had been covered up during its lifetime.
Over the last six years, Chanda has built a focused body of work in woven and stitched textiles and hand-molded ceramics—votive and ritual objects that together constitute a sanctum of personal divinities. His is a patient practice through which he explores ideas, materials, and forms with slow consideration. Intertwined references to the domestic and the ceremonial stem from resonant childhood memories and their historical and mythological contexts. These themes are the constants in Chanda’s oeuvre, from the very first works he made upon arriving in London eight years ago to those exhibited in his milestone 2025 solo show at Cample Line in Scotland.
“I like when things take me back,” Chanda said during a recent studio visit, his freshly unpacked space already lined with a library of books on Indian goddesses, monstrous forms, and ancient art from around the world. The space is larger than his previous home studio, with more floor space to accommodate the planning of his often monumental tapestries and quilts.
A simple wooden shelf houses neatly folded vintage kantha, shuttled in from Kolkata. This workhorse textile of Bengali households, composed of layers of old cotton fabrics put together with a simple running stitch, became a foundation of Chanda’s practice when he encountered his grandmother’s. Rather than adding a patch or a stitch to it, Chanda took away its outermost layer of printed chiffon fabric. This act of unravelling inaugurated his way of working with the past, carefully, as an archaeologist of personal and cultural memory. The quilt is still in the artist’s collection.
Chanda’s grandmother was also his bridge to the world of ceremony. “Ritual objects have always made sense to me,” Chanda said, recalling puja—Hindu rites—in his grandmother’s home temple, with its terracotta idols and offerings of periwinkle flowers. “They are practical and have lasted through time around the world. Everything else in Kolkata has changed, but the shrines from my childhood have remained the same.” Add to this the memory of his father creating traditional floor drawings, or alponas, on auspicious occasions, and we have the personal coordinates for Chanda’s practice. The artist is continuing a lineage of “people creating in their domestic spaces,” as he put it. For him, the domestic is the site of forgotten histories and collective mythmaking.
Many of the artist’s works, carefully constructed from found materials, are titled after minor, overwritten, or maligned goddesses from India’s Vedic history. His monumental work Jyeshtha (2023), which will be exhibited in the 2025 Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala, India, takes as its namesake a goddess later renamed Alakshmi—the negative counterpart to Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of wealth and prosperity. Meanwhile, his elongated vermillion tapestry Serpent Deity II (2022) takes after Manasa, a goddess of lower-caste and tribal communities of eastern India, integral to women’s rituals and outside the male-dominated priestly realm. The artist was raised in the Shakta tradition of Hinduism and is keenly aware of its goddesses’ gradual subordination into patriarchal archetypes by conservative and colonial interpreters. His works seek to restore these goddesses to what he calls their “primal, uninhibited forms”—offering them, through abstraction, the dignity of opacity.
Beginning with a series of sketches and schematic drawings, Chanda’s large works can take up to two and a half months to weave and then stitch together. The repetitive process is not a time for the artist to “wander off.” As he explained: “I resist the reading of weaving being meditative. When I fall into a rhythm, I am hyperaware. I am in the work.”
Chanda developed his method of embodied and active repetition while working as a textile designer in India. During site visits to weaving communities over six years, Chanda “was a fly on the wall, observing the way the weavers worked: with an informed nonchalance, a natural way of making decisions and appreciating certain materials and colors,” he said. While he now works with an improvised frame without the rigid orthogonal restrictions of a traditional loom, he continues to learn by living with and handling materials. And even though he works alone—dyeing, stitching, weaving, and installing by himself—his appreciation for collaboration endures.
“I go back and forth with the idea of ownership,” he said. “In working with kantha, I am conversing with makers whom I would never know, mostly women from more than fifty or more years ago. The strips have their own stories.”
Chanda’s abiding interests are evident in some of the formally ambitious works presented at his solo exhibition at Cample Line, titled “Between Two Fires.” The gallery, adjoining a river, became a stand-in for the intertidal landscape of the Sunderbans delta at the mouth of the river Ganges. There, Who Dwells Within Trees stood guard alongsidecraggy ceramic works perched atop two large sandstone slabs, like the aerial roots of mangrove trees. An almost-10-meter-long narrow tapestry was draped on the wall like a garland. Bundles of hair, like those used to dress idols, trailed off of a trio of ceremonial mask-like forms.
Water, tides, and the mangroves are throughlines in Chanda’s recent work, which will be on view at the De La Warr Pavilion in southern England next year. Here, a new protagonist takes center stage: Bonobibi, the traditional goddess of the Sunderbans mangroves. At stake is her status as a syncretic entity worshipped by both the Muslim and Hindu inhabitants of the delta as a protector. Amid a general incursion of more orthodox Hindu practices in the region, there have been efforts to fold Bonobibi neatly into the Hindu pantheon and rename her Bonodebi, ridding her of the Muslim appellation “bibi.” “These rigid forms have been forced upon her,” Chanda noted. “I want to take away all those restrictions and give her the most formless form.”
As Chanda’s pantheon expands, it grows beyond the space of the home-temple into more uncertain terrain—an intertidal zone. Its goddesses become increasingly elusive. They live in a porous past, one that Chanda turns to without nostalgia, traditionalism, or desire to close its borders.
The Artsy Vanguard 2026
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Video by Pushpin Films / Timi Akindele-Ajani for Artsy.
Thumbnail: Portrait of Sayan Chanda by Timi Akindele-Ajani for Artsy, 2025; Sayan Chanda, from left to right: “Dwarapalika II,” 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Jhaveri Contemporary; “Jomi (Ground) 5,” 2022. Courtesy of the artist and Modesti Perdriolle Gallery.
