Who wore it better: A charpai, a basket bag or this new seating collection?

It all began on a gloomy, winter day in Copenhagen. Architect David Joe Thomas had brought back a block printed cushion from a visit home to India, hoping to introduce a streak of colour to his otherwise muted white-and-beige Scandinavian home. Seeing the bright shades of the pillow—and the distinctness of the traditional craft—disrupt the monotony of his surroundings sparked an idea. Before the thought escaped his mind, Thomas rushed to his sketchbook and doodled a contemporary chair, only this time it was drenched in colour. 

Now, after a move to Bengaluru, weeks-long workshops with weavers and welders, countless cups of coffee with arts manager and editor Manju Sara Rajan, and intricate crafting by many tireless hands, Thomas’s ‘Kasera’ seating collection is up for the world to see. “I wanted to create a piece of furniture where you can explore weaving in the form of colour,” says the designer-architect. 

His five seating styles, available in various colourful contrasts, is presently on display at Kaash, a 200-year-old leafy villa in Bengaluru’s Langford Town that was transformed into a contemporary crafts gallery by Rajan and Sridhar Poddar in 2021. The collection is part of Kaash’s ongoing exhibition Dots. Lines. Checks. that is open to visitors until the end of March, and features three different artists, who have taken traditional Indian craft practices, pulled them out of their regular context and given them a new life in the form of collectible design objects. 

In Thomas’s ‘Kasera’ chairs, the design-inclined will notice two techniques that are worlds apart—the Chettinad tape baskets and cane weaving—lean into each other. On Rajan’s insistence, Thomas headed to Karaikudi in Tamil Nadu where he saw women expertly weaving baskets using different shades of plastic tape. “In India today we have accepted a colonised view of colour—we think it [colour] means cheap. But some materials offer a natural translation of colour and these weavers have a special eye for it,” muses Rajan. 

In an effort to take the colour and material of the vivid criss-cross baskets and transform them to make viable seats, the architect arrived on the prowess of cane weavers, who have spent many decades building knotted charpais and outdoor seatings for Indian households. “The Karaikudi weavers were curating shade combinations that worked on a large, furniture scale while the cane weavers were playing with basket tape, a completely different material,” says Thomas of this never-seen-before collaboration, which served up new challenges for every creative involved. “For me, I was exploring the structure of it all; how to make the seat comfortable or which knots to add in so it can take the weight of the person sitting.”

This slow deliberation and the coming together of unique schools of design to create a novel, crafts-first expression informs every object featured at Kaash. You will rarely find any pre-made artworks displayed here. Instead, Rajan commissions creatives with an interest in material practice, and the duo then embark on the journey from ideation to installation together, employing relevant artisan collectives at every stage.

The two other artists currently featured in the labyrinthine rooms of Kaash, as part of the Dots Lines Checks exhibition, also embody this circle of collaboration. There’s Italian designer Andrea Anastasio, who has used untanned goat leather sourced from Dharmavaram in Andhra Pradesh to create abstract sculptures that look like leather flowers, coming to bloom as the light washes them over. He borrowed material knowledge from Tholu Bommalata, a traditional Indian shadow puppetry art that uses leather dolls to tell stories. Next door, there’s  British sculptor Stephen Cox, who experiments with Bidri, the Bidar-origin craft where precious metals are inlaid on iron. Among his standout installations is ‘Bowie’, a trio of figures embedded with sharp silver lines that instantly bring to mind its namesake singer and pop-culture icon, who probably never foresaw an ode through an art form born out of a small town in Karnataka. But Kaash revels in creating this new dialogue between India’s diverse traditions with contemporary designers and makers. 

So what’s next for the gallery? In the second half of the year, the founders are taking Kaash to Mumbai’s 47-A Design Gallery but until then, they are in no rush to churn out more crafts. “Each exhibit we put on stays for a considerable period to justify the work that went into creating it. We’re not in the business of trends, we’re intentionally slow so people have the time to ruminate in the art,” Rajan shares. It helps that the space they have chosen also manifests this unrushed pace. Although the maze-like insides of the villa change and adapt to the exhibition on display, the outdoors, with small gardens and cobbled paths on all four sides, stays on pleasant pause.

Beyond the objects it homes, Kaash is an experience, and not in the clickbait-viral-on-Instagram way. Housed in a bungalow dating back to the 1800s with a reddish-orange Mangalore-tiled roof, the gallery evokes a leisurely, old-world charm. If you stay long enough to rest on the stone benches that line the yards, carefully placed under a rare canopy of green, you can actually hear the trills and whistles of birds who have built homes on the neighbouring trees. Here, for a moment, the city breathes differently. Until of course, an occasional truck trumpet pulls you out of the escapist trance and situates you back into reality, right in the traffic-pilled heart of Bengaluru. 

Dots. Lines. Checks. is currently on display from 11am to 7pm, from Tuesday-Sunday at Kaash on 2, Berlie St, Langford Town, Shanti Nagar, Bengaluru