Gunjan Tyagi’s art begins not in the studio, but in the landscape — in riverbeds, village paths, abandoned branches, feathers caught in the wind, and materials most people overlook. A visual artist, curator, and cultural facilitator whose practice stretches across more than fourteen countries, Gunjan has built a body of work that sits at the intersection of identity, migration, memory, and the natural world. Whether working with cow dung, stone, rope, or found organic matter, she transforms familiar materials into deeply personal and collective experiences, inviting viewers to reconnect with histories.
Living between India and the United States has profoundly shaped her understanding of home — not as a fixed geography, but as an emotional terrain carried through memory, culture, and the body itself. Her works often exist in states of impermanence, embracing decay and transformation rather than resisting them.
Beyond her individual practice, Tyagi has emerged as a significant force in building international artistic exchange. As the organizer of the India chapter of the Global Nomadic Art Project (GNAP) and founder of SPARK Art Residency in New York, she has created spaces where artists from vastly different cultures can work together outside traditional institutional structures.
In this conversation, Gunjan Tyagi reflects on the evolving meaning of home, the emotional power of materials and why the most universal art often begins with something deeply specific.
Your work is deeply rooted in ideas of identity and cultural memory — how has living between India and the United States reshaped your understanding of "home" in your practice?
Home is something I've always longed for. I spent my childhood away from my parents, and back then home meant missing them. In college, home meant missing my home state. When I traveled abroad, that's when I really understood what homesickness means.
I missed India deeply. The family, the love, the care, the food, the festivals, the culture. Being far away made me see how vibrant it all is, more than anywhere else I've been. I think that's because my heart is there.
Now I'm settled here. I have my kids, my family, my home. This is home too, without question. But a part of me is still there. Even in my work, those colors and that culture find their way in. I don't plan it. It just shows up.
Maybe that's what home really is for me. Two places living in the same person, and the work is where they meet.
You often work with unconventional materials like cow dung and found natural elements. What draws you to these materials, and how do they transform meaning within your work?
I come from a mixed background, both urban and rural, and those experiences left a real mark on me. Cow dung is a good example. In cities people think of it as waste. In villages it's valuable. Nothing from the cow is thrown away. The dung becomes fuel for cooking. It becomes flooring where families sit together and eat.
The smell of that floor, the smoke from that fire, none of it feels bad to people who grew up with it. It's nostalgic. It's home.
What I love is what happens when I use it in my work. The first time I worked with cow dung in a show, I watched people light up. Not politely. Really light up. They'd walk up and start telling me their own stories before I could say a word. Grandmothers' houses. Village summers. The floor they used to help their mothers smooth every week. The material did all the work. I just put it in the room.
The same thing happens with natural materials. A branch, a stone, a rope. People touch them, lean in, remember something. It's almost unfair how easy it is. These materials have been carrying stories for generations. I'm just the one who brought them inside.
That's how I think about materials in general. I see the material first, and then the idea reflects back from it. Objects catch my eye before concepts do. A lot of my ideas come from ordinary conversations, watching people, noticing what's around me. The material tells me what it wants to be if I pay attention long enough.
There's a strong tension between the natural world and human intervention in your art. Do you see your practice as a form of resistance, reconciliation, or something else entirely?
For me it's neither resistance nor reconciliation. It's collaboration.
Andy Goldsworthy once said he's not an outsider imposing his will on nature. He's a part of its processes. That's close to how I think about my own work. The artists at Yatoo, who I've worked alongside for years, show up to a site with empty hands and open minds and let the place tell them what to do. That's the lineage I come from.
Resistance would mean I'm fighting something. I'm not. Reconciliation would mean there's a broken relationship I'm trying to mend. That feels too heavy too. What I'm actually doing is simpler. I'm showing up, listening, and letting the site be the co-author.
A branch, a stone, a river's edge. None of these are passive material. They're active. They decide what the work can be as much as I do. When I finish a piece and walk away, the wind and the rain keep working on it. Sometimes they finish what I started. Sometimes they undo it. Either way, the work isn't really mine. It belongs to the place.
I think the real tension isn't between humans and nature. It's between permanence and impermanence. Most of the art world is built on holding things still. Collecting them, framing them, preserving them. My work goes the other way. It's made to decay. That might read as resistance to some people, but from inside the work it just feels honest. Things pass. Pretending otherwise takes more effort than accepting it.
So if I have to choose a word, collaboration. Everything else is a side effect.
As the organizer and lead of the India chapter of the Global Nomadic Art Project, what were the most defining challenges and breakthroughs in bringing such a large international initiative to India?
The biggest challenge was logistics. Moving international artists through Indian landscapes, securing sites, site visits, dealing with permits, navigating weather. A lot of what looks like curation from the outside is actually hours of phone calls, paperwork, and driving out to places to see them in person before anyone else sets foot there.
The breakthrough was seeing artists from Korea, Germany, France, Lithuania work side by side with Indian artists in a rural setting and realizing how fast language stopped mattering. Everyone was picking up wood, digging in soil, watching the same light. That universality isn't a cliché when you're living it for four weeks straight.
One moment from Kutch, in Gujarat, stays with me. We'd arrived at a site and all the other artists were already deep in their work, making things that looked beautiful, confident, fully formed. I sat there with nothing. Hours went by. My mind was blank. I kept thinking I'd failed, that I didn't belong with this group, that whatever skill everyone else had, I was missing.
Then I started walking. I picked up a feather. Then another. Then I noticed a form in the sand, something the wind had shaped without anyone asking it to. I started working with what I had. What came out of that afternoon ended up being one of the first works I ever made that I truly loved. Not because it was ambitious. Because it was honest. The site had given it to me. I just had to wait long enough to receive it.
That's what GNAP in India taught me as an organizer too. The point isn't to import a format and impose it on a place. The point is to bring artists to a landscape, get out of their way, and trust that something real will happen if everyone stays long enough. Also, bringing this level of work to villages that don't usually get international art was the whole point. Not to export Indian art to the world, but to bring the world into Indian villages and let both sides shift a little.
Having exhibited across 14+ countries, how do different cultural contexts influence the way your work is received — and does that ever alter your approach?
Reception changes a lot, and it's one of the most interesting parts of showing work internationally.
Cow dung is the clearest example. In India, people walk up and immediately start telling me about their grandmother's floor, the smell of the village kitchen, childhood summers. There's no explanation needed. The material does all the talking. In Germany or Austria, the same material lands completely differently. People are surprised first. Then curious. Then they ask a lot of questions. Once they understand what it means in an Indian context, they start comparing it to their own rural traditions. Suddenly we're talking about peat, about ash, about things their own grandmothers used. The material opens a door, just a different one.
I had a similar experience with a work I made involving a donkey. In some countries the donkey carries deep religious meaning. People approached the work with a kind of reverence I hadn't anticipated. Back home in India, the donkey reads very differently. It's a working animal, sometimes a punchline, tied to labor and rural life more than to the sacred. Same animal, same work, two completely different frames. That taught me how much of what we call meaning is actually carried by the viewer, not the object.
A piece about migration I made in Mauritius read as maritime history. The island's whole identity is built on people arriving by sea. Indian indentured laborers, French settlers, African communities. The work felt like it was always there. In Germany the same ideas got pulled into contemporary refugee conversations. Same work. Completely different weight.
In Korea, working with Yatoo, the audience arrives already fluent in nature art. They don't need to be convinced that a pile of leaves or a line of stones is worth looking at. In the US, I often have to hold more space for the viewer to catch up. That's not a bad thing. It's just a different starting point.
I've learned not to over-explain. If a work is honest to its materials and its site, audiences bring their own context to it. That's not a failure of clarity. That's the work doing what it should.
Does it change my approach? A little. I pay more attention now to what a place actually needs versus what I want to say. Sometimes those align. Sometimes I have to put my own agenda down and let the place lead.
Across your roles — as artist, organizer, curator, and cultural facilitator — how do you stay creatively grounded while working on such a global and interdisciplinary scale?
I make work with my hands every week. That's the honest answer. If I go too long without getting dirty with a material, everything else starts to feel hollow. The organizing, the meetings, the planning. None of it means anything if I'm not still making.
The roles feed each other when I'm doing them right. Curating teaches me what I'm looking for in my own work. Running SPARK forces me to articulate why any of this matters. Being an artist keeps me humble about what I'm asking other artists to do. They're not separate jobs. They're the same practice in different forms.
What keeps me grounded is that I don't do any of this for money. I do it because this is who I am. Art is what makes me feel alive. When I walk into a space, any space, an empty lot, an old building, a forest, a street corner, the first thing I see is the work that could happen there. That's not something I have to remind myself of. That's just how my eyes work.
And I'm a mom of two, part of a joint family, with a business in the mix. People assume that pulls me away from the art. It doesn't. It's the opposite. Being rooted in a real life, with real people who need me, is what keeps the work honest. If I were just an artist in a studio alone, I'd lose the thread of why any of this matters.
What I protect, across all of it, is the walking. Time on a site, alone, before anything happens. No phone, no plan, no one asking me anything. That's where the work starts. Everything else comes after. If I lose the walking, I lose the thread.