Bombay-based jewellery designers Studio Renn reinvent traditional jewellery silhouettes, playing with symmetry and forms for jewellery that delight in the seductively subversive.
‘Our works are physical manifestations of ongoing studies – part of a fluid yet focused creative process,’ duo Rahul and Roshni Jhaveri say. ‘While the aesthetics might seem to change, what ties in all the works is how they evolve. We have carried forward certain techniques such as using reflections, emptiness and innovative setting techniques. Our creative process is something we stay faithful to.’
It is a philosophy expressed in eclectic collections such as ‘Cacti’, which sets diamonds on jaws of serrated gold. In ‘Fish’, skeletons are drawn in precision-cut diamonds, while in ‘Digna’ the aesthetic is abstract, with three-dimensional forms dotted with rainbows of precious stones.
‘Everything is inspired by nature, by our environment – either the presence or the absence of it. It is inescapable,’ the jewellery designers add. ‘While the inspirations might spark an idea, inevitably the idea and the works take on a life of their own. Cacti are no longer cacti, but an abstraction of it – a symbol of protection. And the process never starts with designing jewellery. We explore ideas through different mediums – poetry, line drawings, paper sculptures, shadow studies – and it is through this that we create a distinctive language that we then translate into jewellery. We tend to push the practical constraints of jewellery and see where it goes.’
The latest collections, the duo add, are the end result of this process. ‘It is an ambitious effort at the studio to create a distinctive contemporary indigenous aesthetic – one that is our own. It started with a study of indigenous art, not what [people] made but why and how. We attempted to follow the same creative process of abstraction while creating these works. It was completely unchartered territory – conceptualising the works in that manner and then translating them into distinct forms using innovative techniques.’
