Shruti Gaonkar 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 primarily with natural fibres, found textiles, hand-felting, sewing, and dyeing practices, Shruti’s evolving body of work explores what she terms postcolonial softness; a form of resistance through tenderness, play, and speculative world-building. She engages with wool ecologies, indigenous material cultures, land memory, and questions of systemic erasure, while actively resisting rigid binaries of hard/soft, nature/culture, and centre/periphery. 

Her playful and critical approach extends into formats such as participatory games, speculative archives, and soft cartographies. Shruti is currently based in Mumbai after living and working across three continents. Her work is informed by entanglements between climate, gender, ritual, care, labor, and migratory histories. 

She is part of Campervan Collective, a participatory public art initiative formed during her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art, London. Her current long-term project Shunya unfolds through soft sculptures, performance, and site-specific works;  imagining architectures of tenderness and speculative ecologies shaped by touch, memory, and joy. 

At its core, her practice invites communal reimagining and playful resistance ; stitching spaces where fragility and resilience can exist side by side.