Saying it with paper, colour and shape
‘Kaleidoscope’ an interior design exhibition held at Raffles Colombo showcased the group projects of the students of their interior design diploma course. Under the theme ‘Paper, Colour and Shape’, the students had worked wonders with paper, box board, chip board, wood and tape, glued, sewn, drilled and stretched to make intriguing designs.
Pranavan Rockwood
Group one, the seniors, made light fittings, a wall design and even a beautiful Christmas tree from paper with their basic shape as the cylinder, playing with bright colours. “Paper is such a thin and fragile element so we thought of basing our designs on cylinders stacked in a pyramid shape to make the base strong. There was a lot of trial and error and we got so many ideas in the process of making it as well,” said team members Saaraa Silmi and Nishanthini Hamlet.
The intermediates made wall partitions through the arrangement of objects in two dimensional spaces to look like they would in real life. They achieved this with the square and circle as their basic shape as well as lighting angles and shadow concepts and named their collection Perspective.
“Once we came to the route of what our design is going to be, it was easy to get everyone to agree on the concept behind it,” said group members Sanali Rajakaruna and Kavindya Peiris.
The third group, the juniors created a wall paper design, flooring design, stools and a coffee table under the name ‘United collisions’ all by combining the basic shapes of a square and triangle, to form a solid shape called the Gyroscope which is an origami design inspired by the film “I am Sam”. They used 3120 sheets of paper for their designs.
Saaraa Silmi
Batch member Shihani Ranasinghe was in broadcasting and has a diploma in teaching but is now keen on architecture. Pranavan Rockwood is another junior who absolutely loves what he’s studying. “I have always been interested in art which I studied for my O/L and A/L’s. That’s how I found my interest in interior design. But later on I might also do architecture,” he says.
Lecturer, Rocio Martin Ruiz-Jarabo, an architect by profession who has worked in Spain, UK and India was full of praise for the students. “All the students are brilliant. They come from different backgrounds and they have different ideas. The idea of this project was for them to handle challenges and situations that arise during designing.”
“Be Paparetive” was the message that these creative future interior designers had to share.