By Glenn Adamson
Streets paved with gold: it’s a metaphor that has been applied to many places, dreamt-of migrant destinations, any imagined heaven awaiting on earth. Of course, it has never been literally true. But Makrana, a town in Rajasthan, India, does come close. This place has long celebrated for its fabulous quarries. The luminous white marble of the Taj Mahal came from Makrana; now nearly 20 million tons of stone is processed there annually, in hundreds of factories. One consequence of this prodigious industry is a huge amount of waste: castoffs up to three meters in length, leftovers from the process of extracting blocks suitable for clean cutting. The pieces sit piled up on the street corners, a huge material archive gleaming in the sun.
Dushyant Bansal grew up in this region, in a family that was involved in the marble business. But it was only when he left and then returned with his partner Priyanka Sharma – and partly through her eyes – that he could see the wealth lying on the streets, just waiting to be picked up. The two had met as undergraduate design students in New Delhi, then went to London to study at the Royal College of Art. Bansal graduated in 2016 with an MA in interior design, Sharma in 2017, in ceramics. Once back in India, carrying with them the insights they had gained in a very different design culture, they set up a studio together, naming it for the raw material that surrounded them on every side. They were profoundly inspired by the place, not just the quarries themselves – dangerous, difficult, yet nonetheless captivating workplaces, all makeshift retaining walls and exposed cliff faces – but also the ingenious way that local people work with the stone, laying their own steps and floors. Especially exciting to Bansal and Sharma were unorthodox but utilitarian pieces of furniture made from construction site findings, which they see as embodying a tremendous sense of urgency. This is not refined craftsmanship, of the kind they would implement in their studio; but it was all the more intriguing for being so improvisatory.
From its inception Studio Raw Material has relied on a dedicated workforce, recruited from the huge population of skilled artisans in Makrana. The first job was to build out the workshop, with walking paths and walls made in patchworks of stone, like so much organized rubble. Then their designs began to take shape, with an equally energized though far more resolved aesthetic. The approach evolved in direct counterpoint to the local industry. Conventionally, pure white and pink marbles are considered to be the highest in value; they are invariably sold as clean, rectangular slabs. Bansal and Sharma instead select irregular pieces with rich internal variation, each already unique. Rather than engaging the luxury industry often associated with fine marble, they skirted it, taking what lay on the streets and transmuting it, almost in the alchemical sense of that term.
Having gathered their materials, the next step is to combine them into complex arrangements, somewhat reminiscent of Cubist collage. No preparatory drawings are made for the works. Though Bansal and Sharma may create initial small-scale study models, the forms mainly develop during the process of assembly, in response to the fragments at hand. As the finished composition comes together, the pieces are joined using a homebrew adhesive (a compound of marble dust and natural resin, adapted from a traditional recipe). Some surfaces are polished, bringing out the color and figure of the stone. Others are left unfinished, scored with corrugations as if to preserve the force of gouging the material from the earth.
In parallel with their work in marble, Bansal and Sharma began experimenting with paper – a material as quiet to work with as stone is loud. Here too, they found inspiration in the local. During the sacred month of Muharram, Shia Muslims in India create portable replicas of the tomb of Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet. (The original mausoleum is in Tehran, Iran, and the custom of replicating it in miniature is a means of venerating that ancestral holy site.) These taziyas, as they are called, are built with a light timber framework so that they can be carried in procession. Together with two artisans skilled in this trade, Bansal and Sharma developed a series of lights in which a skeletal structure is paired with hemp-based paper. The resulting objects, while not religious in any specific sense, do adapt the octagonal forms of the taziyas, and they have a ritualistic aura, offering a celestial illumination. Everything comes together, literally, in a series of lamps also incorporating marble fragments, which that aptly call Rock Paper Scissors. They are masterful essays in dualistic juxtaposition: equal parts mass and ephemerality, darkness and light, chaos and geometry.
The word “chaos,” in fact, comes up frequently in discussion with Studio Raw Material. They can scarcely avoid it, given the reality of their surroundings. Their studio has matured against a backdrop of unrest: an ugly form of Hindu nationalism that has resulted in the violent oppression of Muslim communities. Bansal and Sharma themselves are from Hindu families, while many of the artisans they work with are Muslim; their collaborative working environment stands in implicit contrast to the ongoing conflict of faiths. They feel that chaos cuts both ways, though, citing the view of Arundhati Roy (author of the celebrated novel The God of Small Things) that the “inherent anarchy” of rural India will always resist the imposition of narrow-minded fascistic order.
Politics aside, Bansal and Sharma obviously draw a tremendous creative vitality from the chaotic, rough-and-tumble backdrop of Makrana, which seems to be constantly, simultaneously emerging from the ground and falling into ruin. This pervasive indeterminacy is reflected in everything Studio Raw Material makes; the objects are poised in a moment of transient becoming. Despite their supreme elegance, it’s obvious that they could easily have been otherwise. This impression of radical contingency is enhanced as one engages with them. Their recent Oxide Desk, for example, suggests an ancient bridge when viewed straight on, a shallow riverbed from above. Khokhar Seat – a breakout work of 2023 that takes its name from a village near their studio – is a chair and a room divider in one, which activates the space around it with a generous, embracing presence. The composition strongly suggests an expansive landscape, but also a rippling folded textile. The perfectly round element at the top could have landed in that position serendipitously, but could also be an emblem of the sun (such a powerful daily presence in Rajasthan). A visual and functional anchor is provided by a perfectly proportioned, symmetrical round seat, heightening through contrast the intuitive collage of the surrounding back.
Khokhar, it turns out, is also the name for a particular type of rāga, the genre of classical Indian music. This is fitting, for a rāga is improvised over an established structure. Somewhat like jazz at full stretch, it flows in a manner both lyrical and rhythmic. It’s a perfect metaphor for what Bansal and Sharma have achieved in their seven years of partnership. The goal, as ever in design, is to find a new path forward, which suits the tumultuous times. They have done this by becoming prospectors of their own rough-and-tumble environment, simply attending to what’s around them, eyes wide open, never knowing what they’ll find. To see the richness of the local joined to the global conversation, you need look no further: Studio Raw Material are the single most exciting recent arrivals to the international design avant garde.
