Gunjan Tyagi is an internationally exhibited visual artist and curator working across painting, sculpture, site-specific installation, nature art, and film. Her practice explores identity, roots, memory, and the relationship between people and the natural world, often using materials with nostalgic and cultural weight such as cow dung, found objects, and organic elements. She holds an MFA from the Sir J.J. School of Art, Mumbai, and has exhibited in more than fourteen countries across Asia, Europe, and the Americas. She has held residencies with Yatoo in South Korea, Tsukuba in Japan, and Waldkunst in Germany, and served as a jury member for the Biennale of Seychelles. In 2026 she was selected for the Every Woman Biennial in New York. She lives and works in Schenectady, New York, where she is Founding Artistic Director of SPARK Art Residency.

Can you tell us about your background and how you started your artistic journey?

When I was two, my grandparents took me in. Raising kids in a small town on a single set of jobs was hard back then, and it eased the financial burden on my parents. So I grew up with my maternal grandparents, my uncles and aunts. There were no other children around. It was a quiet, sometimes lonely way to grow up. Art is what came to fill that space. Before I had any words for it, I was using it to hold my feelings, my emotions, the memories I was collecting. Looking back, that was my first real training, long before any school.

For a long time I had no idea art could be a career. I just kept doing it because I loved it. Then in high school, someone in the family saw that I was good at it and suggested I pursue it seriously. That’s when the real journey began, all the learning and unlearning that comes with it.

It wasn’t easy. There were real financial difficulties along the way. But I made it through, first at Kurukshetra and then at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai. Mumbai is where I truly grew into the work. I spent time at Sakshi Gallery learning how the art world actually functions from the inside, not just how to make work but how it moves through the world.

The biggest shift came later, through artist residencies and international projects. Those gave me experiences no classroom could. I learned to arrive at a site with empty hands and let the place tell me what to make. That’s still the heart of how I work today.

How do you stay inspired and motivated to create new work?

Growing up in India is what inspired me, and it still does. I grew up where means were limited and luxury was a word you heard only a few times. Things got reused until they couldn’t be used ever again. One sari became a dress for three different people, the leftover scraps became a bag, and whatever was left at the end became a quilt or a rug. Nothing was ever just one thing. That taught me to look at every object and ask what else it could be.

The other half of it was the abundance. The block prints, the festival colors, the music that filled the streets during Holi and Diwali. And the stories. I grew up surrounded by Hindu mythology, the images and the epics, gods with many arms, animals that speak, worlds stacked on worlds. Those stories stretched my imagination early. They taught me that reality doesn’t have to be literal, that you can bend it and still tell the truth. Scarcity taught me to look closely at what’s in front of me. Mythology taught me to look past it.

That’s still exactly how I work. Inspiration isn’t something I chase. Just last week I caught myself staring at a pile of old wood someone had left out on the curb here in Schenectady, already seeing what it wanted to become. Everyday objects, overheard conversations, something in the news, all of it turns into material. The practice of looking closely and finding new life in ordinary things is what started me making work as a child. It’s what keeps me going now.

What are the main themes or concepts you explore in your work?

A few things run through everything I make, no matter the medium, and they all come back to one question. What is home, and what do we carry of it.

Identity and roots sit at the center. Where we come from, what we inherit, what stays with us when we leave. I move between India and the US, and that in-between space is where a lot of my work lives. It shows up in my paintings as much as anywhere, in the colors and forms I keep returning to without deciding to.

Memory is the thread underneath all of it. The way an object holds a story. The way a smell or a texture can pull someone back thirty years in a second. Whether I’m painting, building an installation, or working outdoors with the land, I’m chasing that same thing. Materials and images that people recognize in their bodies before their minds catch up.

And then the relationship between people and nature. In my installations and site work I use found and organic materials, things that decay and return to the ground. I’m interested in what happens when we stop trying to control nature and start listening to it. But even my indoor work carries that question. It’s less about where the work sits and more about how we belong to the world around us.

I don’t really separate these themes by medium. A painting, an installation, a piece made from cow dung or fallen wood, they’re all asking the same questions in different languages.

How has your artistic style evolved over time?

Even in art school, I was restless with mediums. During my MFA at the Sir J.J. School of Art in Mumbai, most students stayed in their lane. The painters painted, the sculptors sculpted, everyone kept to their specialization. I couldn’t work that way. I’d take an idea and try it in paint, then in clay, then in collage, then in something else entirely. I wasn’t trying to be different. I just never believed an idea belonged to only one material. Contemporary art amazed me for exactly this reason. The freedom of it. The way artists refused to be boxed in.

The biggest evolution came through travel. In 2014, I went to South Korea for the Yatoo residency, and that was the turning point. Then came Japan, the Tsukuba residency in 2015 and 2016, and later Germany, France, and Lithuania through the Global Nomadic Art Project. Living and working alongside artists from completely different traditions, watching how they approached a problem, how they treated material and site, expanded what I thought was possible. I didn’t take their ideas. That’s not how it works. But the exposure changed me. You can’t sit in a forest in Germany or a field in Korea, surrounded by people making in ways you’ve never seen, and walk away the same artist.

That’s when I moved deeper into installation and nature art. The work left the wall. It got bigger, more physical, more tied to place. My piece “Fancy Meeting” at Tsukuba, built from bamboo, was one of the first where I fully let the site lead. And the moment a piece leaves the canvas, it stops being only yours. The space has a say. The weather has a say. The viewer has a say. I had to learn to give up control and collaborate instead of impose.

But I never left painting behind. I still paint. The disciplines feed each other now. The patience I learned working outdoors changed how I paint. The color sense from painting shows up in my installations. These days I move between painting, sculpture, installation, and film without deciding which one I am. The medium follows the idea, not the other way around.

If there’s one direction to all of it, it’s been from control toward trust. Trusting the material, the site, the viewer, the passing of time. The younger me wanted to hold onto everything. Now I’d rather let go and see what comes back.

What do you hope people take away from your art when they experience it?

Recognition. That’s the simplest way I can say it. I want someone to stand in front of a piece and feel something stir that they didn’t expect. A memory. A smell from childhood. A feeling they can’t quite name but know in their body.

I’m not trying to teach anyone anything. I don’t make work to deliver a message. The things I put into my work, a painted elephant, a crocodile, cow dung, found wood, everyday objects people have seen a thousand times, already carry stories that are older than me. When someone connects to that, it isn’t because I explained it. It’s because the image or the material reached something already inside them.

What I really want is for people to wonder. To stop and see something familiar in a way they hadn’t before, and then find their own way into it. I don’t need them to read the work the way I do. A pile of leaves, a broken branch, the floor of an old house. If two people stand in front of the same piece and walk away with two completely different memories, that’s not a problem. That’s the whole point. The work belongs to them now.

And honestly, if a piece makes someone pause and feel less alone for a moment, less separate from nature, from their own past, from the people around them, then it’s done its work. The art is just the meeting point. What matters is what happens inside the person standing there.

What advice would you give to emerging artists trying to establish themselves?

I’m always a little unsure about giving advice. Every artist’s path is so different, and I’m still figuring out my own. But there are a few things I keep telling myself, so I’ll share those.

Don’t wait for the perfect studio, the perfect materials, the perfect moment. I grew up where means were limited, but I was lucky in the way that matters most. My family always told me to dream high anyway. That gave me everything. It taught me the most important lesson of my career. You make work with what’s in front of you. The constraint isn’t the enemy. Very often it’s the source. Some of my best work came from having almost nothing and paying close attention to it.

Travel if you can, even a little. Put yourself next to artists who work nothing like you. You don’t go to copy them. You go to have your own assumptions shaken loose. I came back from every residency a slightly different artist, not because I took anything, but because I’d seen that there were other ways to think.

Protect your own voice. It’s easy to chase whatever’s getting attention right now. That’s natural, everyone does it. But the work that lasts is the work that’s honestly yours. Be specific. Be local. Make the thing only you could make. Strangely, that’s also what travels furthest.

And be patient with the slow parts. So much of this life isn’t the making. It’s the waiting, the doubt, the years where nothing seems to move. I’ve stood at a site with no idea in my head, certain I had no talent, and learned that if you just stay long enough, the work comes. The same is true of a career. Stay with it. Keep showing up. Let it grow at its own pace. 

Text and photo courtesy of Gunjan Tyagi

Website: https://www.gunjantyagi.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gunjantyagi/