Jewellery, now there’s something that has been around since cavemen decided to string the teeth of their captives around their neck as a show of achievement. Having been around for billions of years, jewellery too has evolved into something more creative and less ghastly.
From gold to sea-shells, worn by women and men, designers are constantly thinking up new ways to explore and create jewellery that’s unique and interesting. The design student of the University of Moratuwa have been doing just that as they experimented with paper, creating pieces of jewellery that you wouldn’t imagine started out as a flimsy sheet of paper.
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| Dinushi Ariyaratne |
Prasana Peiris |
The concept was the brainchild of Hiranthi Pathirana, Senior Lecturer at the University of Colombo. She says the concept of designing jewellery out of paper came to her three years ago when she asked her design students to experiment with paper as a project.
“Designers work a lot with paper when making models. This was an opening project and the students proved that with the use of different types of paper, the concept of paper jewellery is something that has a lot of potential."
“One little cut can make all the difference," Dinushi Ariyaratne(25), who was one of the students who worked on the paper jewellery project, explains how paper jewellery has potential in creating a myriad of designs. “It’s all about how you fold and cut it. Paper jewellery can catch on as the labour cost is not high, it allows you to experiment, there is also a wide variety of paper, so it could be profitable for designers or manufacturers,” elaborates Dinushi.
Describing her design, she says, “I used folding techniques to make 3D stars. It was very light and the ends were not sharp so it didn’t hurt the skin. I decided to make the star using the cutting and folding technique because I didn’t want to do the usual beads and that required a lot of experimenting. Working with paper in this way helps you to hone your creativity in other aspects of designing as well. It also gives you the freedom to experiment and makes you think out of the box."
Prasana Peiris (26), another student from the University of Moratuwa who worked on the project shared Dinushi sentiments saying “When it comes to costume jewellery you don’t intend to use it forever. It’s also less expensive and gives the designer space to be creative. The only problem is durability but that can be solved by coating it with wax."
Prasansa describes her work saying “My inspiration was derived from something traditional, the Padakam Malathatha, though it was not exactly modernised. I made barrel beads which ranged from red to yellow- the colours of the sunset, which too was a source of inspiration. The Padakam Malahatha starts from the collar bone and has seven pendants, starting from large and gradually becoming smaller.
Hiranthi also expressed that the beads are quite hard. “It all depends on the layers that are glued together. The students did countless experiments to see how they deform and tried to prevent that."
“Some students made pulp, others wove it- there were 12 different techniques, found by the batch of 50 students,” she says, adding “if made well people will buy paper jewellery."
Could paper costume jewellery dominate clothing stores in Sri Lanka? By what the students of the University of Moratuwa have accomplished, paper jewellery has all the potential to take the market by storm and continue to provide creative jewellery in terms of texture and design. |
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