When Rooshad Shroff’s 15,556 opened at Delhi’s Bikaner House in February this year, the number that gave the show its title referred to the number of man hours taken to create the pieces on display. The show’s title in Mumbai has stayed the same, but there’s more work spread across Pundole’s, the art gallery-turned-auction house in Ballard Estate, and so the hours devoted to create the sum total, has seen an increase as well.
Says Shroff, about the first ever survey of his work in the city, “Essentially, it’s a culmination of the research that I’ve been doing for the last five years.” Trained as an architect, (he’s studied at Cornell and Harvard Universities and worked briefly at Zaha Hadid Architects, London) Shroff’s interest in furniture started out, “To investigate different materials, techniques of making and in some cases they became into furniture pieces, but still very much stuck in the realm of prototypes and not really retailed anywhere,” he shares. That has changed, with this show, which features works that are available for sale, some as one-off designs, others in limited edition and some can be made on order.
New approach
Over five years, Shroff and his team (he has two carpenters working under him, but otherwise works with artisans for his marble and embroidery work), have reached the level of precision and quality that were good enough to exhibit. The focus is on three different techniques, including one on which Shroff holds a patent. The patent is for embroidering on wood, and as Shroff says while walking me through the show, “You see the embroidery in different forms, on chairs or benches or the screen, and there are different kinds of stitches—so its zardozi embroidery—using a cross stitch or a French knot.” Shroff points to a wooden screen, and says, “This screen is where the embroidery has been pushed to its limit, just for the fact that’s it double-sided embroidery. So here, to make sure both the sides are perfectly done, and also joining threads or any knots or anything is done through the thickness of the wood.” The screen in question features three panels with embroidery in yellow, orange and red, forming abstract circular patterns, with a level of detail that masks any breaks in thread, or knotting even on close inspection.
The other two ideas that Shroff researched was marble carving, and lacquering and coloured sanding, which builds up multiple paint layers, before Shroff hands sands each surface down to reveal colour contours, that shine from under 20 layers of lacquer, to achieve a glossy finish.
Working hands
As an architect, Shroff has put his research to use in projects like the interiors of the Christian Louboutin store at Horniman Circle, which showcases wooden embroidered tiles, but on the whole, his architecture practise and furniture design are two distinct entities. “I consciously try to keep the two quite different. In terms of the practise in the office, they both influence each other, in a way; the furniture side was always like a research hub,” he says.
The common thread that runs through the work, is a focus on showcasing artisanal skills, that are slowly being lost as the focus shifts to mass-produced, machine-objects. For Shroff, the ability to work in a country with the “craft at hand,” is one that he is hoping to capitalise on, and during our conversation he discusses how he moved from someone who was once very interested in technology, after all Zaha Hadid’s architecture practise is known for bringing computer-aided design to some of the world’s most recognisable buildings like Baku’s Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre. “It’s a conscious direction that I’ve taken of not replicating that aesthetic. What most often happens with people working at Zaha is that because it’s so stylised in terms of its architectural identity, you know the form, that that somehow almost gets engraved within people and they kind of mimic that or imitate that,” he articulates.
Where Shroff is able to move beyond craft fetishism is modernise traditional techniques and make them relevant for the 21st century. So his marble carvers adept at making deities, found it harder to work with Shroff’s minimalist curves and cutting. By pushing design to its limits, in the case of drilling holes for the embroidery in wood, Shroff is keen to examine the way that materials function, and see how each one’s inherent properties can be explored. For the young architect this research is both an exercise in intellectual stimulation, as much as a way to make rigorously thought-out design objects.
15,556 is ongoing at Pundole’s, Ballard Estate till July 7
