Perfectly Stacked
Gunjan Gupta’s new Continuum collection delves deeper into her collaborations with Indian artisans (image: Anuj Arora).
Many of the pieces in designer Gunjan Gupta’s Continuum collection appear to be held together precipitously. Low tables are stacked on top of each other to form a voluptuous totem pole, for example, while gold and silver vessels balance on the back of a bicycle seat. “It makes you feel like it’s all going to fall apart,” Gupta says. “But that’s the feeling I want to communicate, because when you walk into spaces in India they look very makeshift or slipshod, but actually, it’s perfectly organised.”
When Gupta began her career nearly two decades ago, she set out to define what contemporary Indian design could be. “Throughout the colonial period, we had so many beautiful things that the country made for lifestyle use, and then it all vanished,” she explains. “Post independence, India lost flavour as a coveted aesthetic – the power dynamic totally shifted, and we lost a lot of very critical patronage.” Gupta adds that many Indians traditionally sat on the floor or used stools and low tables before European settlers normalised the use of elevated furniture, which was previously reserved for people in positions of authority. “Quite wonderfully, we were a culture that evolved with yoga and Ayurveda, which were all about supporting the back through seated posture,” she says. Gupta began observing people’s everyday lives, from villagers balancing pots to street vendors with goods towering on top of two wheels, and developed a design aesthetic that playfully toes the line between chaos and order. “What was revealed to me is that there is a deep flexibility, modularity and versatility in the way Indians live,” she says.
Gupta’s Bartan Wala Bicycle Throne was inspired by street vendors selling goods piled on the back of bicycles (image: Anuj Arora).
Gupta also began exploring India’s rich craftsmanship traditions and collaborating with artisans across the country, often incorporating industrial processes to turn decorative objects into functional ones. Her latest collection, Continuum, delves even deeper into the relationships that underpin her work, and is framed as a creative dialogue between Gupta, Indian artisans, and Lekha Poddar, a friend and collector of Gupta’s designs who is renowned for her work in preserving traditional handloom crafts. “The historical premise for designers working with craftsmen has always been that the designers take credit for the craft,” Gupta says, explaining that she is keen to collaborate with artisans as equals and celebrate their work. “It's high time that we put an Indian lens on our culture, as opposed to a Western lens,” she says. “So the dialogues [with craftsmen] are more and more important.”
Gupta’s Dhokra Doll vases resemble The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro, a statuette made during the Indus Valley Civilisation (image: Anuj Arora).
The Dhokra Doll Vase, for example, was born out of conversations with Sushil Sakhuja, an artisan who specialises in Dhokra metal casting, an ancient technique using lost wax. After learning that Sakhuja usually makes dolls, Gupta proposed making a design based on The Dancing Girl of Mohenjo Daro. “Its the first surviving doll from the Indus Valley Civilisation,” Gupta says, explaining that the figurine was discovered during an archeological dig in the 1920s that revealed architecture and artworks from a society that existed during the Bronze Age. “That was an excavation which changed our understanding of who we were,” she says. The concept resonated strongly with Sakhuja, and after Gupta sent him 3D prototypes, they went back and forth with designs until they created three vases which stack together to create an abstract doll. “Each time he called me he was like, Oh my god, it’s falling apart,” she says. “But there was so much engagement and passion because he connected with the idea as much as with the process.”
Gupta’s Phad Totem Pole Tables were painted by artisan Kalyan Joshi to represent the five elements of the earth (image: Anuj Arora).
“The divide between tradition and modernity with craftsmen is really a myth,” Gupta continues. “There is a zeitgeist, and they can think very much like you.” To make her Phad Totem Pole Tables, for example, Gupta collaborated with Kalyan Joshi, who can trace his lineage back to 13th-century artists who created paintings depicting traditional folk tales in Rajasthan. “He comes from generations of storytellers who used to go village to village carrying a scroll that told the story of the region,” Gupta says. In order to carry forward the idea of storytelling through artwork, Gupta asked Joshi to paint the tables with a pattern that represented the five elements of the earth. “The colours he used were so fashionable,” she says, referring to the flames of ochre, red and terracotta which spindle down the tables when stacked together to form a totem pole. “We worked together, of course, but he brought so much to the table.”
Close collaboration is also essential to Gupta’s precarious aesthetic. “When it looks like it’s going to fall apart but it’s so brilliantly put together, you can’t design something like that,” she says. “A render or a drawing can never make that happen – it’s got to be something that you experience visually.” In order to create works of orderly chaos, Gupta and her collaborators make multiple iterations of each piece and allow serendipitous mistakes to guide the final design. “Sometimes the best of ideas fall apart and sometimes the worst of ideas come alive, it's very organic and dynamic,” she says with a shrug and a smile. “I love it more and more.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown