Shruti Gaonkar (b. 1984, Mumbai, India) 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 with natural fibres, found textiles, hand-felting, sewing, and dyeing practices, Shruti explores what she terms postcolonial softness, a form of resistance through tenderness, absurdity, acts of collective repair and speculative world-building. Her work engages with wool ecologies, land memory, indigenous material cultures, migrations and decolonizing archives. Her evolving practice includes participatory games, speculative myth-making, and soft cartographies. From soft beings to site-specific interventions built through collective offerings, Shruti’s work conjures spaces that are playful, raw, and emotionally charged.

She is currently based in Mumbai, after living and working across three continents. Her practice is informed by entanglements between climate, gender, grief, ritual, care, labor, and migratory histories.  Shruti is founder of Campervan Collective, a participatory public art initiative formed during her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London. She holds a MS in Architecture and urban design from Columbia University in New york city and Bachelor in Architecture from University of Mumbai India. With over 15 years of work experience as a practicing architect and designer Shruti is currently working on a long term project called Shunya exploring nomadic pastoral wool ecologies and tenderness.  At its core, her work invites communal reimagining and playful resistance with acts of collective repair. Stitching spaces where softness and resilience can sit side by side.

Curriculum Vitae

2024