This has been their focus since 2017, when they started the studio in Makrana, naming it for the raw material that surrounded them. “I come from a marble industry family,” says Bansal, who graduated from the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, in 2016 with a master’s in interior design. “I know Makrana well; it’s become a landscape of dumped marble.”
He and Sharma, who graduated from RCA in 2017 in ceramics, moved from Delhi to Makrana since they wanted to work with local artisans and study how people in the region used waste marble not as a luxury product but as an essential building material. “People here use marble waste to make shelters, tea stalls, benches. Why should only fine marble be seen as something luxurious, expensive and a highly finished material? Marble is dumped when it has blemishes, fissures and markings but it can also be useful and beautiful,” says Bansal.
Over the years, Studio Raw Material, which counts luxury brand Dior among its regular clients and has showcased in London and New York, has made sculptural chairs, lamps and tables, combining irregular pieces of colourful marbles pieces like a Cubist collage with the help of artisans who have generational knowledge. A moss green table, for example, has been created using six discarded marble pieces joined to look like a cohesive design. Each piece, costing well over a lakh, is dependent on what is found in the dumpyard, making most creations one of a kind.
Such experimentation using waste materials, found objects and traditional crafts are giving a push to India’s collectible design story, which lies at the intersection of art and functional design.
As the understanding of limited-edition work and functionality-led art and design is growing, there’s more confidence among designers to innovate and make their work visible. In fact, the forthcoming four-day India Art Fair, which starts on 6 February in Delhi, has a dedicated collective design section, bigger than last year’s. The 2024 India Design ID in Mumbai, too, had a collectible design pavilion that saw participation from emerging as well as established design studios.
“South Asia, especially India, is becoming the global design destination. The whole world is looking at us right now, not just for fashion but also design,” says India Art Fair director Jaya Asokan. “We always had a lot of innovation in collectible design but I think it wasn’t being showcased enough at a fitting platform in a more curated manner. Our designers’ work is getting more innovative, showing how confident we are becoming with traditional and contemporary.”
At Studio Raw Material, the designers don’t use adhesive. “We use joinery, a vernacular technique (like a notch carved in the marble itself),” says Sharma. “It’s been used for centuries to build temples; we wanted to bring it to everyday collectible design and make a local stone part of the global design conversation.” Raw Material is bringing their latest Khokhar (“hollow” in Hindi) series of design objects to Delhi for the studio’s debut at the India Art Fair.
ART, DESIGN AND FUNCTION
The fair also has a showcase, Shifting Horizons, curated by Chicago-based Alaiia Gujral, bringing together the next generation of Indian designers who blend traditional craftsmanship with contemporary design by reimagining materials like metal, wood, ceramics and textiles.
Jhankar Khandelwal will present furniture pieces that spotlight the traditional thatera metal craft of Jaipur, while Nitush and Aroosh’s presentation will showcase stainless steel as sculptural lighting and furniture.
“Design has always been functional. Post covid, there have been more conversations about how design can be art as well as functional, something which has been popular in the West for a while but it is only gaining attention here how,” says Gujral. “Plus, consumer thought has moved from, ‘I will buy this once I have space in my house’ to ‘I will buy this and make space for it’—something that was happening in fashion. There’s more confidence among designers to experiment because they know they can present their work on social media to gauge the interest of the audience. Designers are coming out of that box of art, and including techniques like inlay and hand-carving into art that’s functional and innovative.”
Mumbai-based jewellery design practice Studio Renn is returning to India Art Fair this year with Found, Formed, its experiments with metals, precious stones, and stones, rocks and wood found on streets or during treks.
“(We use) pieces of rock found during treks and juxtapose them against baroque pearls, odd-shaped pearls. Or, interpret indigenous jewellery in a contemporary way, using both silver and gold, and question the idea of what’s precious, what’s not, use silver to create volume and use gold and diamonds to elevate the piece further,” says co-founder Rahul Jhaveri.
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The other reason they’ve picked silver over gold is that most indigenous jewellery in India that has survived is in silver. “The value of gold is such that inevitably people end up melting it. Even in our museums and private collections, our jewellery heritage has survived more in silver than in gold. We wanted to highlight that using Kutch jewellery as an inspiration because it is extremely clean and there’s something very contemporary and bold about it, which is interesting considering the landscape is barren,” he explains.
Another highlight of their collection is their design response to wood. A brooch, for instance, is fashioned from a piece of wood studded with diamonds. A set of pins has oddly-shaped diamonds.
“About 98% of what we collect cannot be used. These are just things that we find intriguing in terms of form, colour, structure, anything,” says Roshi Jhaveri, Studio Renn’s co-founder. “These pieces are not collected with the intent of making them into jewellery, rather the jewellery is made as a reaction to observing them. The jewellery is more like a by-product, and this allows us to ensure that people get access to unique objects from the design side.”
That’s perhaps one of the biggest attractions of collectible design. Buyers too want unique made-in-India products that become conversation starters, while making their living spaces beautiful and unique.
Designer Vikram Goyal has a theory for it. “We have moved away from that ‘ethnic’ idea of India,” says Goyal, known for his fine collectible design using brass and one of the pioneers of collectible design in India.
“Today, the consumer is much more interested in made-in-India creations that look global. Something that could look Japanese or French, but actually is made in India. And since there is demand for such things because of more income and the desire among the young population to spend money on designing homes, designers, including me, are encouraged to experiment more.”
In November, Goyal, in collaboration with British luxury interiors company de Gournay, launched a limited edition of gilded wallpapers that referenced repoussé metal in bas relief on gilded paper grounds.
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Repoussé, a centuries-old process in which artisans hammer low-relief designs into malleable metal sheets, was traditionally used in India to create different parts of temples, from doors to ceilings.
One of the three designs for the wallpapers, Harmony of the Heavens, reflected the astral observatories of India through an interplay of geometric forms. Another wallpaper design, Garden of Life, pays homage to the beauty of nature and mythology and will be showcased at the India Art Fair in the form of a 9×22 inch mural, besides other limited edition pieces including his Shaded Graphite Collection (Cabinet, Mirror, Wall Sconce) and Mesa Console.
What’s also perhaps helping is the growing desire among designers to elevate a traditional craft by collaborating with international brands.
In Hyderabad, Rohit Naag, founder and creative director of Nolwa Studio, who has presented at Design Miami fairs in Miami and Basel, is giving a contemporary twist to the 600-year-old Bidri metal inlay technique.
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His limited edition Standing Lab floor lamp is a multi-cuboid construction patterned with handcrafted parallel lines of Bidri work created in association with a Germany studio.
Then there’s Horizon Lamp, a wall-mounted lamp with Bidri inlay on its concave surface, done with a Syrian-Canadian designer from Sharjah. At its India Art Fair debut showcase, Nolwa Studio is presenting a 8x80inch bar cabinet, made using zinc, copper alloy and hand-inlaid silver, which took two years to make.
“I wanted to see what happens when you merge Bidri with parametric architecture aesthetics. So, we commissioned a design studio from California. It’s got a very futuristic, edgy vibe, far away from traditional Bidri, which has always been a floral, Persian, geometric sort of an aesthetic,” says Naag. “I think it’s good time for us because while fashion is well-known globally, experimentation with indigenous craft and design on a global scale has just started happening now, in the past two to three years.”
One of the big advantages of such innovations is the access the consumer gets to unique materials and limited edition products. Design is often led by the raw material rather than the sketch the designer makes. Though these are luxury products, most designers are also willing and able to customise work and objects depending on the buyer’s budget.
“We can make things a different colour or size, but we can’t change the design,” says Bansal. “When you work with found objects, it can be a bit restricting. You work with constraints. But if you see it from our eyes, that restriction can be very liberating, and most importantly, fun.”
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