Artist
Shruti Gaonkar
Shruti Gaonkar is an interdisciplinary artist, architect, and facilitator whose work moves through textiles, performance, material archives, and collective imagination. Rooted in postcolonial feminist thought, her practice weaves tactile ecologies of queer softness, radical care, and embodied memory across installations, soft sculptures, participatory workshops, and research-led projects. Working primarily with natural fibres, found textiles, hand-felting, sewing, and dyeing practices, Shruti’s evolving body of work explores what she terms postcolonial softness; a form of resistance through tenderness, play, and speculative world-building. She engages with wool ecologies, indigenous material cultures, land memory, and questions of systemic erasure, while actively resisting rigid binaries of hard/soft, nature/culture, and centre/periphery.
Shruti Gaonkar, Indigo Darpan