Blue is Radhika Surana’s favourite colour. Walking into her solo debut exhibition ‘Somewhere I Have Never Travelled’ at Delhi’s Art Alive Gallery feels like stepping into that love—the space is awash in indigo.
The title borrows from E. E. Cummings’ poem of the same name, a reflection on love, vulnerability, and the unknown. For the Gurugram artist, the show is a journey through her own idea of life, gesturing toward inner exploration—through thread and indigo-dyed works. “The poem is about relationships, which is what my work speaks to as well,” she tells TMS.
It also becomes a space to explore places she hasn’t yet travelled to with needle and paper. “My art process is spontaneous and unplanned. I don’t plan to start working. I just pick up the thread, and it starts travelling. I don’t know where it’s going, and that becomes the first step,” says Surana.
Threads tell a tale
Surana’s art practice combines indigo vat dyeing on paper with embroidery, stitched fabric, and sometimes watercolour. She frequently uses seed stitches. “It represents growth and new life. It’s meditative, but also holds narrative,” she says.
In ‘Lichen’, running stitches end in loose threads, like conversations or relationships that never quite close, layered over blue colour splattered across. Another series, ‘Interactions’, combines fishnet wire, cloth, and handmade paper, stitched together onto paper, mimicking how we interact in messy, social spaces. Some fabrics are torn or scorched, others are visibly mended.
Her works are also ecological. She draws parallels between natural and human networks. “Trees support each other. Lichens nourish. It’s like relationships—helping, pulling down, nurturing. That’s the thread running through all of it.”
Weight of the blue
Once dubbed ‘Blue Gold’, indigo was one of colonial India’s most lucrative exports, entangled with British exploitation and the Indigo Revolt of 1859.
Surana doesn’t use indigo lightly. “It’s a form of reclamation,” she says. “A way of going back to your roots.” Used in art and dyeing traditions since the Indus Valley Civilisation, Surana honours this by embracing the labour-intensive process of traditional vat dyeing, working with a 50-litre lime-based vat made of indigo powder, lime, and tamarind. “It’s like a child,” she laughs. “Miss a stir or get the pH wrong, it gets upset and gives you dull colour.”
In ‘Building Relationships’, a four-canvas series, she layers dyed Wasli paper (used in miniature painting) to show how relationships deepen over time, each canvas progressively turning a deeper blue. “The final one was painted directly with dye powder to achieve that depth,” she says.
Her mediums are unforgiving, and her process often responds to the materials —their tears, folds, resistance. In ‘Connective’, she stitched together torn paper and painted it with indigo, letting the damage guide her. “Sometimes the paper tears, and I just work around it. It’s like life—you take the tear and make it part of the story,” says Surana.
Historically dismissed as “women’s work,” embroidery in Surana’s hands nods to often-unseen labour. “These pieces are spontaneous, yes, but they’re also a conscious nod to that history. Most textile artists have been women, and we see it through that lens,” she says.
Despite working with indigo for nearly five years, she says she hasn’t exhausted its depths. “I’m not ready to move out of the blue. There’s still so much left. My work is spiritual and emotional. When I’m stitching or making these dots, each step reinforces gratitude, good feeling, and good emotion,” says Surana.
Each thread, dip, and tear stitched back together becomes part of what she calls an “emotional archive of feeling, memory, and care”.
On view at Art Alive Gallery, S-221, Gamal Abdel Nasser Marg, Block S, Panchsheel Park till August 20, 11 am to 7 pm