Born into a family that traded in granite and marble blocks, Ruchika Grover would visit quarries and stone processing units in India and abroad with her father. Those early visits made her want to look beyond the plain surface of the stone and think about just how much could be created with it. Today, she is the director of Odyssey: Stone Architecture and Design, and has worked extensively to rediscover the potential of stone as an aesthetic design element.
“It was a gradual process, stretching out over almost three years after I completed my studies. I would travel to all these quarries and would always see these plain, boring facades or typical Rajasthani patterns everywhere, and I would think of how much more I could do with a medium like this,” she recalls.
Having received no formal education in design or training in working with stone, Ruchika feels that she has been somewhat at an advantage, musing, “I think my lack of training liberated me, to be honest. I’m not confined by any rigid considerations of technique, symmetry or structure, I can look anywhere for inspiration and be inspired in any way I like. I visit science and specifically biology blogs a lot, and they inspire me tremendously.
Anything and everything can inspire me.” Given that stone as a medium comprises innumerable natural varieties, working with it is tantamount to a journey of constant discovery. “Absolutely,” agrees Ruchika. “There are so many kinds of stones in India alone! For me, this is one of the most exciting things about working with natural stone.” And how does her design process incorporate the endless natural variations?
“I usually come up with a fairly large set of patterns out of which a few are eventually approved after sampling them on the softest kind of stone we have. You see, each stone reacts differently to each pattern and each tool. Once I have the final set of samples, they are translated into the final bigger piece. This is a process that can last for months and is fairly painstaking but very fascinating too,” Ruchika shares.
Ask her how she goes about balancing technology with labour-intensive skill work in her designs and she is quick to respond, “Technology and craftspeople are equally important to my design process. There are some inlays that are so intricate that a machine could never do them.”
While Ruchika admits to being inspired heavily by nature, she points out that an important part of her growth as a designer is to experiment with more avenues of inspiration. One of her recent collections at Odyssey, titled ‘Ishikiri’, draws inspiration from the Japanese art of Origami, milling Indian marble to a state of translucence and giving it a paper-like texture. “The whole idea is to innovate and come up with things that have not been seen or done before with stone. We also did a collection inspired by corals, since we do a lot of water bodies and the trouble with those is that people often stop maintaining them. For that collection, I created sculptural installations such that even if the water wasn’t on, the piece would look complete and self-sufficient,” she says.
At the moment, the designer is working on pushing her own boundaries and working with an aspect of stone that she hasn’t dabbled in before: Bling. “Yes, I’m beginning to work with some bling now and creating gemstone chandeliers!” Ruchika tells us. “I’m also working on a nature-inspired collection that is going to be very different from what you might expect. Everything I’m working on is basically an attempt to live up to my design ethos: I firmly believe that you should design not to impress, but to inspire,” she concludes.
