Shivani Aggarwal born in New Delhi, India 1975. She is a Post Graduate in painting from Wimbledon school of art (London, UK) where she was studying under Charles Wallace art award in 2003.
Shivani Aggarwal’s practice interrogates the quiet yet charged spaces between care and control, function and dysfunction, containment and expression. Drawing from everyday domestic and industrial objects—thread, wood, terracotta, fiber, and found materials—she creates psychologically resonant installations that measure, encase, and hold emptiness, not as a void, but as a space of infinite possibility.
Her work emerges from a deeply introspective process shaped by memory, gendered labor, and societal conditioning. In her sculptures, copper-wire yarns are hand-crocheted into webbed cocoons and mesh-like enclosures, while teakwood bundles spill letters—words once withheld, now released—speaking to forgotten promises and the fluid meanings of language in political and cultural structures.
Aggarwal challenges the idea of function itself: ropes that do not bind, outlines of objects that serve no purpose, vessels that both hold and threaten to spill. Her use of thread and fiber becomes both a gesture of repair and resistance, weaving intimate tensions into material form.
During the pandemic, the body of works positioned emptiness as fertile ground—a place where stillness becomes generative, and solitude reveals structure. The viewer is invited not just to look, but to stand still, move slowly, and enter a space where time folds inward and thought expands.
Aggarwal’s sculptures do not demand attention—they ask for presence. In their quietude lies a radical softness.
The artists lives and works in New Delhi.