Matthew Chin
Reporter
matthew.chin@guardian.co.tt
Walking into downtown Port-of-Spain, it is hard to miss the big buildings that tower above our heads. The Twin Towers of the Central Bank and the International Waterfront are just two examples that make us look up and realise how small we are despite being islanders. However, other feats can pique our interest in their tiny size alone, instead of ours.
American-born Trinidadian Nalini Sookdeo did this in CBC’s third season of Best in Miniature 2023. The ten miniaturists, including Sookdeo, were selected from the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom to compete for a prestigious residency and a $10,000 cash prize. But it was the British tattoo and miniaturist artist Elliot Langford, who would be declared the winner of Season Three, copping the spoils.
Coming out of the competition as the semifinalist, the 32 year old admitted to feeling disappointed in herself. However, she was still proud of how hard she had worked and the opportunity she had to share her Trinidadian roots with an international audience.
“I was very, very disappointed, I wish I could have made it further, but I’m also at the same time very proud of everything that I was able to put into the show. I feel like I really showed my heart and soul, I talked about my family and about Trinidad, about the culture. I’m just happy I was able to do that,” she said.
Describing her experience of being on set, she was forced to adapt to the lights, cameras, and actions of those around her while also battling a timer that had more cut-eye to give than grace.
“It was a lot to get used to with cameras in your face because I am used to crafting by myself. You’re surrounded by people, talking ... that was challenging. Each challenge had a time limit. The most time we had for one challenge was ten hours, and it was less than that for the smaller challenges which were 90 minutes. It was very difficult,” she confessed.
Aside from her favourite hobby of assembling tiny houses, she enjoys painting and doing ceramics, each of which she had taught herself to do.
Outside of her home in Maryland, Sookdeo works as a full-time certified social worker-clinical (LCSW-C) and therapist, specialising in anxiety, depression, and domestic violence cases.
“I’ve been a social worker for eight years now. I wanted to be a therapist since I was 14 years old. My mom put me in therapy when my parents were having problems, and it felt so good to feel like I could talk about everything. And I wanted to do that for other people and be able to have a safe place, so people could talk about their problems,” she said.
The artist began building tiny houses/dollhouses in 2019 after she had left a turbulent relationship. Which, for her, was the catalyst for becoming a miniaturist, and ultimately what would lead her to claim the title of semifinalist for Season Three of Best in Miniature.
“I started doing it in 2019 when I’d gotten out of a bad relationship and needed to find a new hobby. I always liked interior design and artwork. I did it to decompress ...” she said.
For those coming out of toxic relationships and reimagining singlehood anew, she suggested being serious about self-care and actively discovering what makes you happy and expanding on it, without any apology.
“I would say focus on yourself, try new things, do a lot of self-care, really think about what happiness could look like because that’s sometimes hard to see or understand what happiness is; it’s different for everybody,” she says.
Sookdeo is a South girl with most of her family hailing from and residing in Vistabella and Marabella. Paying homage to her uncle’s home in Trinidad for one of the challenges of the show, she had constructed a rendition of it that wowed the judges.
“The house on the show, it’s yellow like one of my uncle’s houses in Trinidad. It is a house you’d find in Blanchisseuse, English-influenced. I tried to put a lot of colour in the house. It has a sun ray in the front—the judges loved that; they said they could tell it was an island house ... and feel like you’re at the beach,” she says.
Common materials Sookdeo uses to create tiny houses:
• Wood
• X-ACTO knives
• Mini saws
• Chipboard
• Coffee stirrers
• Popsicle sticks
• Fabrics
• Scissors
• Spray paint
• Acrylic paint
• Needle and thread
• Glue (hot glue, superglue, tacky glue)
Unlike what she had been accustomed to building before the show, the tiny houses on set were confined to a scale of 1:12 (a traditional ratio for miniature pieces), meaning one foot in the real world, but one inch for the size of a doll house.
“So I like smaller, I like things that are smaller than that which is 1:24; it’s hard, it’s very precise, you have to get the measurements absolutely correct or else it’ll look weird,” she says.
Although living away in the US, she misses everything about T&T, including the wide variety of local food that she said was scarce in Maryland where she and her mother both reside.
“I miss everything. I think number one, it’s that I miss my family, it’s just me and my mom up in the States. We barely get any doubles or roti in Maryland,” she says.
When asked whether she was returning to Trinidad to enjoy Carnival, her tongue had slipped into a pure Trini dialect.
“Oh, yes! Ah playin’ with Spirit!” she laughed, adding, “I’ll be there with my best friend, we’ve been to Carnival all over together ... Miami, we were in Trinidad [last year] together, it’s our thing.”
With something as niche as crafting miniature items in a big world, she distances herself from the negative comments made about her hobbies, while holding onto the positives that inspire her to keep excelling at what makes her happy.
“I’ve had people think it’s weird, like why would somebody do [tiny houses]. I think no matter what you do people will always have something to say about it. I do my best to focus on the positive things because I can’t change people’s minds, if somebody’s gonna be upset about something it doesn’t have anything to do with me.”
Nalini Sookdeo was engaged last October during a trip to Trinidad. She is planning to sell tiny houses and other pieces of her work now that she has proven to herself what she can do. “It’s been on my mind, especially after the show. I think I proved to myself that I’m a good enough artist that people would enjoy my work. So, definitely, it’s on the horizon,” she says.
Rapid-fire questions
1. Favourite soca tune?
Hard Fete by Bunji Garlin.
2. To honk a bad drive or cuss it out?
Cuss it out.
3. What is your dream vacation?
Barbados.
4. Bifold doors or accordion doors?
Accordion doors.
5. One surprising fact about Nalini Sookdeo?
I’m a big gamer; I like to play The Sims.