Sukanya mani

ARTIST STATEMENT

My artistic practice investigates the lived experiences of women, particularly from immigrant and refugee communities, through immersive installations that bring together material experimentation, spatial installation, and community-based research. With an educational background in science, I approach installation as a site where scientific and emotional forces converge. Concepts like gravity, time, light, and space aren’t simply metaphors in my work—they’re structuring principles that shape both form and meaning.

Thooli: After the Birth is a site-specific installation and community-centered project that looks at postpartum care through personal experience, cultural practice, and shared research. Drawing from my background in science, I build the work as a spatial system where light, gravity, memory, and story come together to shape an experience.

Rooted in my experience as an immigrant giving birth far from home, this project explores the emotional and cultural gaps in postpartum care when ancestral support is absent. It responds to the fading of intergenerational knowledge once passed through touch, ritual, and oral tradition—revealing the isolation, resilience, and rediscovery that arise in its absence.The Tamil word thooli (my native language) refers to a cloth cradle, suspended from the ceiling, used to gently rock newborns to sleep in South India. 

Here, viewers are not static observers but moving participants—invited to walk, pause, and weave their own paths, activating the installation through their bodies. At the heart of the work, low-hung hammocks crafted from donated sarees (a garment traditionally worn by women from South Asia) float just above the ground. 

In this installation, Thooli becomes both a sculptural focal point and a metaphor for ancestral knowledge, and the emotional weight of caregiving.

ARTIST BIO

Sukanya Mani is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice reclaims the act of cutting as a transformative gesture—one that interrogates violence and reconfigures it as creation. Working primarily with cut paper, found objects, and immersive installation, Mani draws on a background in science to manipulate spatial perception, often using her work to reshape how viewers engage with physical and conceptual space. Her installations are deeply rooted in feminist inquiry, exploring systems of knowledge, embodiment, and resilience through material experimentation and educational engagement.

Mani’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis; Museum of Art, DeLand, FL; Lansing Art Gallery, MI; The Quinlan Visual Arts Center, GA; ReBloom IAPMA Paper Art Biennale in Hagen, Germany; and the Of Paper On Paper symposium in New Delhi, India. She was awarded the Riverfront Times Changemaker Award (2022) and the St. Louis Visionary Award (2025), and has delivered a TEDx talk (St. Louis, 2021) on the intersection of art and activism. Her works are held in both public and private collections, and she has been widely recognized for her commitment to community-based art practices and the integration of social consciousness into aesthetic form.