As this Pride Month comes to an end, amidst the usual streamers and slogans, the fatigue is harder to ignore. As corporate allyship thins and institutional support recedes, queerness – especially its quieter, messier, more expansive forms – feels increasingly at odds with the narratives being platformed. Against this backdrop, liactuallee’s practice emerges not just as art, but as quiet resistance. Not in slogans or banners, but in slow gestures: coils of salvaged rope, crocheted tendrils & folds of soft sculpture that pulse with motion and memory. Liactuallee’s sculptural world is made of precisely that: loops, coils, folds, spills, and knots. It’s a vocabulary of refusal – of straight lines, rigid meanings, and easy binaries.
Over the past year, Liactuallee’s work has been reaching across new orientations stretching across floors, climbing walls, or hovering mid-air. They move toward a slack and looseness, toward forms that appear to be shedding or unravelling. These are not static sculptures. They fold into themselves. They droop, drift, and ripple outwards. They rest without resolve. In their debut solo exhibition, Soft Invasions: Stitchpunk Visions at Method Bandra (June 2023), hand-crocheted forms and stitched textures unfurled across space with an animated, almost creaturely presence – alive, alert, and sensorially charged. Instead, there was this stubborn presence of softness, a refusal to be shaped into something other than what it is.
Working primarily with textile waste, salvaged rope, and hand-crocheted forms, Liactuallee creates sculptures that occupy space like living organisms: resembling bodies, corals, flora, or otherworldly forms: bending, gathering, resting, and resisting. The use of discarded and recycled materials is not merely ecological; it is deeply political. These works are built from what is overlooked, what is thrown away. In that sense, they share deep affinities with histories of queer survival: using what’s at hand, building from scraps, and weaving lives from materials not meant to last.
But this practice didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It has roots – in place, in process, and in queerness.
Liactuallee grew up in Eastern Europe, in a public education system that, despite its structural rigidity, allowed them early exposure to arts-based learning, and empathetic pedagogy. That childhood – structured, yet open to creativity – offered them fluency in observation and mark-making, that has since grown from sketch to structure, from mark to form. Their earliest works were on paper: sketches, figures, lines. But over time, the work began pressing against the frame of the canvas, aching to unfurl into new dimensions. The shift to soft sculpture wasn’t just a change in medium, it was a shift in orientation. A commitment to making art that breathes with you. That doesn’t shout. That doesn’t always try to resolve.
From an art historical standpoint, their work resonates with a lineage of feminist material practice. There’s a clear dialogue with artists like Eva Hesse, Yayoi Kusama, Magdalena Abakanowicz, and Louise Bourgeois, who used biomorphic forms and pliable materials to push back against the monumentality of traditional sculpture. But perhaps most strikingly, Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party feels like a crucial conceptual ancestor. Chicago’s iconic installation turned the traditional art canon over on its head – placing female, bodily, and craft-based labor at the centre of artistic discourse. Similarly, Liactuallee insists on the visibility of the soft. Not as weak, but as persistent, sensorial, and deeply knowing. Their softness is not submission, but
This feminist-embodied knowing also extends into their process. Their art practice is interwoven with somatic attention, not as lifestyle branding, but as a way of returning to the body, to breath, to the internal rhythms that govern both movement and stillness. In a world of deadlines and digital churn, their relationship to yoga offers a unique counterpoint: a reminder that art can emerge from slowness, from repetition, from listening. When overwhelmed, they return to their studio to sit with an unfinished piece, to stitch a little more, to breathe alongside it. There’s no urgency to finish. No expectation of ‘productivity’. Just presence. This engagement with meditation and somatic practice is integrated into, rather than separated from, their art.
What is striking, especially in the context of Pride, is the refusal to represent queerness as clean, sharp, or celebratory. This is not parade aesthetics. This is the queerness of quiet reconfiguration, of breath, of introspection, of building worlds not for display, but for dwelling.
If queerness is a way of imagining new worlds, Liactuallee’s dream Pride space gestures toward exactly that: a craft library, part reading room, part making space. A quiet sanctuary with soft bursts of colour, energy, and togetherness. A place to rest, read, and create. A place where softness is not exception, but architecture.
Their installation Transmutations, showcased at the India Art Fair 2025, exemplifies this ethos. A sprawling outdoor canopy crocheted from recycled plastic ropes and nylon threads, it offered moments of respite to fairgoers, while also addressing environmental concerns. The piece wasn’t just a shelter, but a temporary soft architecture, suspended between care and collapse. It resisted the monumental, in favour of the transient, and in doing so, created space for pause.
Beyond Transmutations, Liactuallee has been busy unfolding new layers in their practice. Their Porosity (2024) pieces, born during the Hampi Art Labs residency, map the pull between isolation and permeability, showing us what seeps in, spills out, and how psychic borders shift under pressure. In Totemic Shifts (2024) they wove candy wrappers and recycled yarn into vertical soft sculptures in Ladakh’s Disko Valley: fragile totems buckling and bending with the wind, reminding us of freedom’s fragility. While their new Imagined Ecologies (2025) pop up on their website as hybrid landscapes where plant forms flirt with prosthetics and atmospheric grief feels tangible. Each new iteration feels both a step forward and a slip further into poetic collapse.
Liactuallee’s work often blurs the line between object and environment, between sculpture and ecosystem & between artwork and world-building. Inspired by Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction, they’re less invested in fixed identity, and more drawn to the logics of ‘becoming’: through spiraling, knotting, folding into oneself and slowly unfolding outward – in forms that appear in constant motion: dripping, curling, pulling away, gathering, or slipping just slightly out of view. The work doesn’t insist on permanence. It asks instead to be noticed in a Deleuzian flux.
Queerness, in liactuallee’s world, is a lived logic, a material language. Theirs is a way of working that honours ambiguity, fluidity, and refusal. Their forms are never quite one thing: they reference bodily organs and sea creatures, plants and prosthetics, forms that hover between the organic and the invented, never fully fixed. But just as you begin to pin them down, they slip away. This evasion is deliberate. It resists categorisation, just as queerness resists static identity. Here, to be undefined is to be free.
And yet, the work never shies away from complexity. In their more recent explorations, there’s been a willingness to step into what they describe as a darker register – works that move beyond optimism, into spaces of discomfort: raw, visceral pieces that embrace messes, the grotesque, and even the abject. Textures that recall bruised skin, tangled guts, and open wounds – but still cradled with care. Still soft. Still queer
In a Pride Month that, as the artist pointed out, feels particularly “dry” in terms of real solidarity, liactuallee’s practice offers something deeper than visibility. At a time when mainstream narratives often overlook the nuanced experiences of queer individuals, their work stands as a testament to the power of softness, ambiguity, and resilience. Their practice not only challenges traditional art forms but also creates spaces for reflection, community, and healing.
Their work gives us a queer futurity built from scraps, from care, from slow survival. Their work doesn’t demand space. It makes it, fold by fold, and stitch by stitch.
For those looking for queer support, safety, and solidarity in India:
- The Humsafar Trust (Mumbai)
Health services, advocacy, and safe spaces for LGBTQIA+ communities
→ humsafar.org - Naz Foundation (Delhi)
Health, rights, and support for LGBTQIA+ individuals
→ nazindia.org - Sahodari Foundation (Tamil Nadu)
Trans advocacy, art therapy, and empowerment projects
→ sahodari.org - Queerala (Kerala)
Malayali queer voices, storytelling, and legal support
→ queerala.org - Mariwala Health Initiative
Mental health work with a queer-affirmative lens
→ mariwalahealthinitiative.org - iCall
Free and confidential mental health support (phone and email)
→ icallhelpline.org
Gaysi Family
Creative platform for queer Desi narratives