Aditya Pandya profiles artist Sandilya Theuerkauf, whose sculptural-relief works are deeply rooted in South Indian landscapes, forming dense compositions of collected natural materials.

Sandilya Theuerkauf is an artist, educator, and restoration ecologist from South India. He not only lives and works here but is also rooted with an unusual depth in the region’s natural landscapes. His sculptural-relief works of the last decade—dense compositions of found bark, twigs and thorns evoking both grace and a raw, vibrating intensity—speak of his intuitive bond to the land and his continuous explorations of it. Each piece is a personal study of a single species, often a single tree, and the experience of seeing, touching, and spending time with it in its landscape; it is accordingly titled with the two-part botanical name of that species. The materials are collected from dead trees during his walks in the forest or in the outskirts of Bengaluru, where he now works. They may be assembled months or years later, lovingly mounted on wood salvaged from the doors of old buildings being taken down in the city.

It was during a forest walk with Sandy, as he is known to most, twenty years ago, that I climbed a tree from the inside. It was a Strangler Fig that had lived off its host for years until all that remained of the original tree was the space I was now in — a hollow latticed column the diamond windows of which let me gaze out at the other canopies, some eight or ten metres off the ground. We were in the tropical rainforest of the Gurukula Botanical Sanctuary in Kerala, originally a land stewardship project started by Sandy’s father, Wolfgang, who had wandered into India from the ruins of post-war Berlin a couple of years previously in his late teens. Witnessing the forest being cleared by families from other parts of Kerala incentivised to settle the land, he had begun collecting various local plants in a small nursery, unaware that he was doing “conservation.” Wolfgang married Leela, who came from one of these families, and Sandy and his sister grew up in this remote corner of the Western Ghats.

Later, Sandy would help support the Sanctuary’s projects, including introducing students and other visitors to the forest, and ways of seeing and experiencing it. I was there for a month in a decisively formative year on the cusp of adulthood, and this particular walk had begun with Sandy asking us to play with “open focus,” an idea that I have since held close. He meant actively letting all of the forest’s sights, sounds, smells, its changing temperatures and textures, into one’s awareness. He seemed a creature of the woods, compact and quiet of body and speech, yet seeing, hearing and reaching things we couldn’t. When I met him last month in the city of Bengaluru to talk about his artistic practice, many contexts were different, but little else seemed to have changed.

Sandilya Theuerkauf, “Canthium parviflorum,” 2018, thorn branches on wood, 29 x 23 x 7 inches, photo: Manush John

On discovering he has something to say

Sandy has now had two solo shows in India, including at the India Art Fair earlier this year, with numerous articles in the press, a documentary, and a gallery behind him. Driving to his workshop an hour out from the city’s last metro station early on a Tuesday morning, his two German Shepherds rearranging themselves around me in the small car, he recalls the beginnings of this particular practice. In 2016, having made numerous carvings on wood and stone over the years, he was now assembling thorns and twigs in various ways when the filmmaker Manush John showed interest in making a film about what he was doing.

“Working towards the film gave [the practice] some direction, in that I slowly realised I have something to say about what I’m doing or why I’m doing it — that there was any relevance beyond what I was doing for myself,” Sandy tells me. “The idea of approaching a gallery, having a show, came much later [from Manush] … It was all very new for me, I had no idea about this whole art world.” Even now, his affinity is with people working with nature rather than the art community, he says.

The workshop

The urban sprawl finally gives way to granite hills softened with clumps of bright green vegetation; though daily platoons of trucks take parts of them away to the city, so far the hills still dominate the landscape. Nestled at their feet is the workshop and living space that Sandy spent the Covid-19 lockdown building, much of it by himself. The workshop is a small, simple structure with two sides in exposed brick and the other two open, overlooking a lush vista. A table in the centre holds the skeleton of a piece recently begun — raw planks that have been planed and joined, with curving pieces added and other parts ground down for the undulating, more sculptural kind of base he has recently been interested in.

Sandy’s workshop, 2025, photo: Aditya Pandya

Leaned against one wall are the reclaimed wooden doors, beams, and pillars, with their half-peeled paint and holes. Sandy extracts and collects the large hand-wrought nails from them, sometimes using them as feet for a piece. On the other side is a recently finished piece that is yet to be washed clean, and an old, termite-eaten one that he wants to rework, to more consciously include the termites’ contributions — “They are sometimes my colleagues, and sometimes my enemies.” Everywhere else are cane and rubber baskets and cardboard boxes with collected stuff — the paper-thin but extremely hard outer skin of the thorny succulent Euphorbia, the thick soft jackfruit bark with its blood red underside, twisting Eucalyptus twigs and the pliable peeling bark of its trunk. For sticking on the Eucalyptus bark Sandy makes little cloth sandbags that help apply gentle but even pressure (he uses a stone for the stiffer bark). There are no light fixtures, as he works exclusively in the daylight.

On formats and formalising

Looking at the work in progress as well as finished pieces, now preserved from the elements in a newly acquired shipping container, I remark on one of the most explicit aspects — the juxtaposition of the organic textures and shapes with the often clean, geometric edges of the composition. “Simple shapes,” he says, “My interest is not to make something ornamental or fancy. I want to bring attention to the material as it is, the colours, the textures, [by] formalising it, framing it. I visualise the pieces in sterile places, white walls — a completely contrasting space.”

I notice that changes happen very slowly — I’m not that willing to experiment just for the sake of experimenting or making something that hasn’t been done before.

We talk about how the work takes shape — organising principles and formats, and how these might change over time. The idea of “parameters” comes up repeatedly. Some are determined by the material, such as the sizes the bark will be cut into to have them flat enough to stick — this depends on the bark’s curvature, that is, the circumference of the trunk or branch it came from; another, of course, might be the amount of bark available from a particular tree or species. In the more recent pieces, the bark is broken by hand rather than cut — “I like the effect … How it naturally breaks becomes another format or parameter.” The flat base is also being replaced by ones that swell and dip in a topographical, almost muscular way. About such shifts, Sandy observes, “I notice that changes happen very slowly — I’m not that willing to experiment just for the sake of experimenting or making something that hasn’t been done before.”

During the making, Sandy may not know which way the piece will finally be oriented, but there are no more than two options because the grain of the base plank must run vertically — it makes him too uncomfortable otherwise, he chuckles. Sometimes a piece will also end up being shaped by Sandy’s fourteen-year-old daughter: “She takes a lot of interest in my work, and she has a good sense of the visual. So sometimes when I am not sure about something, she usually gives a clear direction and I go with that.” Other parameters are far more fundamental. Sandy says he would be lost if someone were to give him already collected material — the time he spends outside, looking, noticing, and gathering, is the foundation of his practice.

On something else operating

Many of the pieces have a clear logic that is visualised from the start, gradations of colour or texture — from dark to light, or degrees of roughness, thickness, or weatheredness of the bark, which, as I learn, varies depending on which part of the tree it is from, or how long the tree has been dead. Other compositions seem to follow subtler directions.

“Even though I set out some parameters when I’m working … I’m realising more and more that something else is operating also, something I don’t know how to explain — and I want to be in touch with that, allow that. I like it when the framework is kind of set, but I’m playing with it, not directing it so much, and something is emerging. Breaking the rules maybe, but I see it more as allowing something to happen. To trust the eye and the hand — there is some kind of familiarity coming through them. Let the hand do what it’s doing, and be attentive. That seems like a precious space, and I think you can apply it to poetry or music or painting. … There’s some sense with the work that you have to set it on its course and then let it be.”

On ideas, and something that can never die

Sandy tells me he doesn’t make sketches. Material is often collected with no plan in mind; in fact, he rarely goes out hunting for anything — he is simply walking, absorbing. This enables him to often see a familiar bark or thorn anew. At the same time, many clear images come and go: the final piece in his mind’s eye, the bark of a tree he knows forming a specific pattern on a particular old door. Yet — “The ideas are tricky. Often, when it comes to it, I don’t have one. It works only if I execute the idea when it comes. To hold on to an idea, to remember and recreate an idea from last week — I don’t know why, suddenly I’m not interested.” Given his commitment to everything being born from attention in the moment and to the material at hand, it seems to make sense that an idea from before would feel hollow; this might even be part of an internal discipline. “It is,” he says, “Parameters, again. Without any framework, there is confusion. It feels right to do something with clarity. In a way, if I have this kind of framework, the practice can never die. For me, building rock walls at the Sanctuary, working with the soil, planting trees, or walking — it’s all connected, it’s all part of it. Here it happens to take this form.”

Sandy collecting material, 2017, photo by Manush John

On beauty, and why he makes

Mid-morning, Sandy suggests we go for a walk in the hills. As we climb and the expanse of the landscape opens out around us, Sandy points out trees he has been working with, fallen twigs he’s had his eye on, tousled grass where a leopard left its territorial scent markers overnight, caves where bears live, colonies of bladderwort and other minuscule carnivorous plants thriving in the rock pools.

“At some level, it is a personal journey — how do I learn about these places? I want to pay attention to the place in the things I’m touching, working with,” he reflects, “Spending time [in the place], the act of gathering, registering the smells and sounds, seeing other things in the process, learning how a particular bark breaks in the hand — all of that is informing me. In a way, the work is my own discipline of learning about places and about species.

“But at another level it’s about something broader that is not to do with me. I’m not particularly interested in any specific narrative of me going out. I’m more interested in how we relate to this earth that we’re living on … some kind of deeper relating through the body, which seems to be much more intimate than through the intellect. There’s so much beauty in everything, all that is creation, that we are part of — not just the waterfalls and sunsets — how to pay attention to all of that? How does one register that beauty? … And maybe with some sense of urgency, because there’s a lot of anxiety — about things one learns through social media, the news or whatever, but also the alarming changes one witnesses. So what does one do in this anxiety? What do I do?

Sandy walking with the dogs, holding a piece of Euphorbia bark, 2025, photo: Aditya Pandya

“The practice of art, in a way, has no meaning. And I like that also, because in a way it is something outside of society, and it’s a kind of non-participation. I’m doing something that is non-consequential, that I can throw away. That may be another aspect. If I stop doing my art, I’m not going to miss it. But I would miss something if I can’t go to a forest or be in nature. So there are different kinds of aspects that inform me in this practice that ends up in these things stuck on planks. And different things come out at different times, depending on the questions; that’s been interesting to see.

“Maybe one lens could be just that I love it. I enjoy it, I like working with my hands. I needn’t say anything more than that. But then I realise that all these other aspects are also dictating it. I’m doing it in this format because I want to relate to the place. I feel it’s important for me, and it’s important for human beings. Our peripheral vision is always so small; more and more, the centre of our universe is situated here [pointing at himself]. You have a tough day and come out to a place like this — something dissipates, doesn’t it?”

In Sandy’s work lies for me the fruitful tension between the uncompromising specificity of rootedness in a place on the one hand, and on the other, this dissolution into something far larger — an open focus, with the visceral intimacy of being inside the body of a tree.

Sandy with his work “Catunaregum spinosa,” 2018, thorn branches on wood, 68 x 16 x 6 inches, photo: Manush John

About Aditya Pandya

Aditya Pandya grew up in the city of Ahmedabad and now lives in the township of Auroville, South India. He is a writer, editor, artist, and designer; some of his work can be found here. His research interests include poetry, language(s), dance and somatic movement, and visual art and design — particularly their processes and philosophies. He presently leads the Encyclopedia of Art at the MAP Academy.

About the MAP Academy: The MAP Academy is an open-access resource focused on the art and cultural histories of South Asia.

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