A quick scroll through Advaeita Mathur’s Instagram handle (@studio.metallurgy) is enough to reveal her off-beat aesthetic — upcycled industrial jewellery, coral-looking metal, and even a trumpet lamp. What a closer look reveals is her ability to portray symmetry without making it look forced. Her inspiration: nature. “To make something look aesthetically beautiful when it is not following an exact pattern really does take some inherent amount of symmetry,” she shares. “And nature has a lot of it.”
Mathur’s recent collection, Bones from my Ocean, won the Elle Graduates Award earlier this year, and Sharda, showcased at India Design ID, is an homage to her paternal grandmother she never met, featuring glass objects d’art made with wood scavenged from lumbar yards.
A start-up of her own
The 28-year old jewellery and product designer from Delhi studied history at St. Stephens even though she knew she wanted a more creative career. After a yearlong design course in Italy, she returned to work in the ateliers of Tarun Tahiliani. In 2015, finding herself unemployed after a start-up job did not go as planned, Mathur submitted to, and won a spot in Myntra’s design incubator. Her proposal: jewellery inspired by her personal collection.
The result, Metallurgy, has grown into her full-time venture today. Her first website, she admits bashfully, was only created this year. “Up until January, all I had was a Facebook page and Instagram, and it's grown through these two channels,” she says.
Upcycling with flair
Mathur describes her creations as artist-oriented, using indigenous techniques and everyday objects that “are being repurposed and looked at in a different manner”. A recent collection uses plastic waste found in the ocean to recreate coral shapes. Her idea to convert a trumpet into a lamp (“not rocket science”, she tells me), came to her when she was researching musical spare parts that could be repurposed into jewellery. “I stumbled upon the fact that these brass instruments allow me to run a wire through them.”
Even as she professes her love for repurposed material, Mathur is quick to distance herself from those who “upcycle in this very arty, non-finesse way, because it doesn’t end up having the value that it should” — what she calls the “ jugaad ” version of artisanship.
“Three years ago, it was impossible for me to find European standard-approved electric cables for lamps,” she reveals, describing days spent walking the length of the Chandni Chowk market in Delhi. “It was just not lucrative enough for Indian artists to work on a small scale.” Today, the tide is slowly changing. The volume of Mathur’s orders, both for her jewellery and products, has steadily increased. “It's very hard for Indian homegrown designers to demand the same price as foreign brands and not be called expensive or haggled down,” she says, adding that, “there's a lot of potential in the Indian market” as more consumers realise the value of limited-edition, artisanal designs.
Jewellery prices start at ₹6,500 and trumpet lamps at ₹23,000. Details: studiometallurgy.com
