Navigating material and meaning with Usha Seejarim

In Unfolding Servitude, Usha Seejarim offers a visceral meditation on labour, lineage and the layered architecture of identity through sculptural assemblages that defy easy classification.

The work is exhibited at Southern Guild — an institution known for its boundary-pushing approach to design and art. Beyond the formal qualities of the work lies a deeper narrative: one of tension, transformation and the quiet resistance embedded in material and gesture.

In this conversation, we step away from exhibition summaries and delve into the personal, philosophical and poetic impulses that guide the artist’s journey.

Do you remember the first time you felt the impulse to make something with your hands? What was it, and what did it teach you?

I grew up with very few luxuries while my mum provided the best she could as a single parent. When an uncle of mine visited and saw that I enjoyed colouring in with a small selection of crayons, he gifted me a jumbo-sized colouring-in book and a Crayola set of 64 crayons on his next visit. I was so excited about the sheer abundance of wonderful pages to fill and tones of colours that even had gold and silver colours.

I took great pride in filling the images with neatly shaded colour and anticipated my uncle’s next visit to show him how beautifully I had coloured the images in the book. He complimented the images that I had filled in and made a few suggestions that opened a whole new world for me. He said that I did not have to stick to the pre-drawn lines of the images, that I could fill the shapes with pattern, as opposed to flat colour if I wanted and that I could even add to the images with my own drawings if I wanted. These suggestions were so liberating for me. Apart from the permission to literally colour outside of the lines, it taught me that I did not have to conform, that I could make my own rules and that I have creative licence.

How do you negotiate personal memory and collective history in your work? Is that tension important to you?

While I am cautious not to claim to speak for a collective, I recognise that making work from a personal position often creates space for others to locate their own experiences within it. My approach is rooted in the specificity of lived experience, particularly those shaped by gender, the domestic space and personal lineage, but I am consistently aware of how these narratives intersect with broader sociohistorical frameworks.

Rather than attempting to represent a collective voice, I aim to create work that is situated and accountable, foregrounding subjectivity while inviting a relational response. Personal memory, in this context, becomes a method of accessing histories that may be overlooked, fragmented or suppressed within dominant narratives. 

In Unfolding Servitude, we see you continue in a mode of working you have become known for. Could you shed some light on the reasons behind the repeated usage of the objects which you work with?

Beyond the repetition becoming habitual, I am developing a deeper understanding of the inherent properties and expressive possibilities embedded in these materials. I constantly aim to push beyond their perceived limitations, exploring new formal and conceptual possibilities within them.

The recurring objects serve as both material and metaphor, anchoring the work in physicality while allowing for an exploration of abstract and conceptual concerns. In the context of Unfolding Servitude their presence becomes a conduit for articulating the layered dynamics of servitude. Through a central core, I attempt to reveal the latent narratives of labour, care and subjugation they carry. These transformations are somewhat ideological, allowing the objects to speak to systems of power, constraint, and resilience. As I continue to work and re-work with these materials, the repetition of these forms is less about sameness and more about the evolving complexity of their articulation. 

What role does failure — or the idea of it — play in your studio process?

Failure is a huge part of my process. In fact, almost every artwork inevitably starts off with too much.

Too many ideas in one piece or complicated superfluous forms, or technical solutions that are way too excessive. I have embraced this process, because, I almost have to get it wrong before I get it right. The wrongness/failure becomes a marker as to where to take the artwork. Sometimes that process can take a few years or sometimes it happens in a day or two. 

How do you see the current art ecosystem supporting (or failing to support) artists whose practices sit between craft, design and fine art?

There are increasing discourses around hybridity and interdisciplinary practices, with some institutions programming exhibitions that attempt to intentionally blur traditional boundaries, like the Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950—2019 exhibition at the Whitney Museum for example. I feel like craft in particular, has re-emerged with urgency, often led by feminist and decolonial frameworks that challenge the Eurocentric canon and revalue materials and processes previously dismissed as decorative or domestic.

Structural support like funding, acquisition and even gallery representation seem to flatten hybridity, by wanting to place artistic practice into a marketable, commodification box. This is something that I believe Southern Guild is addressing by purposely blurring the categorisation between craft, design and contemporary art. This makes space for artists engaging with embodied labour, cultural heritage or relational processes that resist objectification.

While there is momentum towards more inclusive frameworks, overall, I feel like the art ecosystem still needs to unlearn its taxonomies and build infrastructure that truly values cross-disciplinary practices, not as novelties, but as essential forms of cultural production.

• Unfolding Servitude is on at Southern Guild Gallery, Cape Town until May 22.