Woman Of Steel: Tarini Sethi’s Steel Worlds Are Made To Shift Perceptions

Tarini Sethi’s sculpture-making process begins with the act of cutting and rejoining. Before stainless steel became her material of choice, the New Delhi-based multidisciplinary artist created detailed figures and surreal landscapes from paper, cutting handmade sheets into the distinct shapes of figures and floral environments and illuminating them from behind. The interplay of light and shadow was always an element of her practice. Now, Sethi has channelled her interest in negative space, light, and change into steel — transforming the industrial material into something porous, theatrical, and full of life.

Her stainless-steel sculptures are intricate assemblages of bodies, plants, animals, spirits and imagined architectures. Multi-limbed and deliberately difficult to classify, Sethi’s figures inhabit a surreal world where the boundaries between human and non-human, masculine and feminine, body and landscape are constantly dissolving. Steel, with its associations of permanence and structural strength, becomes an unlikely vehicle for this fluidity. Cut, bent, layered and perforated, it acquires an almost lace-like delicacy, its hardness rendered visually unstable.

Sethi's works frequently draw on Indian materiality, such as utilitarian stainless-steel gates and railings, alongside traditional art-historical motifs, including miniatures, sacred architecture, and mythological figures, to explore steel's fluidity and radical interdependence. Her sculptures retain something of the material’s durability while appearing almost weightless, particularly when light passes through their intricate apertures. As the sun moves, the works change; their shadows stretch across surfaces and surrounding landscapes, producing a second, ephemeral sculpture alongside the physical one.

The gate has become an especially resonant architectural motif in Sethis’s practice. It operates as a threshold, portal and invitation: a passage between the world we inhabit and a speculative one in which humans, animals, plants and deities exist in radical interdependence. Her new body of work ‘The Sun Bathes Its Friends and Neighbours’ (2026), presented by Rajiv Menon Contemporary at Frieze Sculpture, develops this idea through four interconnected stainless-steel gates. Installed in London’s Regent’s Park, the sculpture is designed to absorb its surroundings, allowing reflections, sunlight, shadows and passing bodies to become part of its constantly shifting composition.

There is a distinctly Indian visual vocabulary embedded in these structures — echoes of sacred architecture, mythological bodies, and ornamental excess — but Sethi rejects the rigidity of inherited symbols. Her practice is closer to a process of continual recombination, she says. In a recent interview with Livia Russell for Frieze, she described her making as a form of “automatic writing”: beginning without a fixed image and allowing the work to emerge through accumulation, alteration and accident.

Sethi’s sculptures do not necessarily aim to depict a utopia; but they create an environment in which one can be imagined. Their forms are porous; their shadows move freely; their meanings are only temporary, shaped by those who interact with them. In Sethi’s steel creations, solidity is not the main focus; instead, the emphasis is on transformation.

Tarini Sethi’s ‘The Sun Bathes Its Friends and Neighbours’ (2026), presented by Rajiv Menon Contemporary will be on view as part of Frieze Sculpture 2026 from 16 September to 1 November at The Regent’s Park, London.

If you enjoyed reading this, here’s more from Homegrown:

Monuments To Her Vision: Women Are Reshaping Sculptural Legacy At Art Mumbai 2025

Radhika Sanghvi’s Sculptures Are A Conversation Between Form, Light, and Feeling

Urbanscape: Paresh Maity’s Giant Bronze Jackfruit Sculpture Is An Exercise In Absurdism