She sees beauty where we see trash!
Most people would see discarded tyres on the roadside simply as trash. Udari Mohotti is different- she sees the potential in what others throw away without a second glance.
‘Umo Designs: From Trash to Treasure’, made by the 25-year-old, a recent graduate of the Department of Integrated Design of the University of Moratuwa, features a breathtaking handmade jewellery collection fabricated from old vehicle tyres and tubes. Reducing and recycling scrap, Umo Designs helps the garbage problem in Sri Lanka as well.
Her education at the Moratuwa University played an important role in her creativity as she learnt how to experiment and try out new things.
She relates the example, of an assignment where she had to create something out of banana fibre. Seeing discarded paper and cardboard in her university, Udari started making portraits out of them.
When it comes to jewellery, Udari makes every piece by hand. It begins with finding discarded tyres which she gets from shops that dispose of them. She then gets them cut at the shop itself and then begins the most difficult step of creating the jewellery. The levelling of the tyres, she does manually with a hammer– it takes one hour of levelling to make one pendant. This was the reason Udari wasn’t able to take an order of 300, and she is now looking for some capital to get the equipment needed to level the tyres.
Udari Mohotti
After the levelling, Udari cleans the tyres and then cuts them into shape, connecting the pieces together with metal connecters and finishes the process by applying a rubber sealer, which prevents the jewellery pieces from getting damaged.
“Nature is filled with so many perforated surfaces, which are absolutely amazing and unbelievable in their natural compositions. Beehives, corals, cell structures, mushrooms, sea shells are some examples of amazing perforated surfaces. The voids create dramatic and visually light spaces that not only look sleek and clean, but fresh and dynamic. The “Perforate” collection of Umo Designs encapsulates all of these features.
The combination of the patterned shadows cast on the skin by the voids and the natural black colour creates great contrast with the wearer’s skin ,” says Udari.
“A spectrum provides a hint that a simple piece can have a wider range of possibilities hidden within. The ‘Spectrum’ collection is an abstract idea extracted from the most common light spectrum in nature, where one simple ray has much deeper and meaningful rays of colour combined within. The Spectrum collection too consists of voids and layers to emphasise the natural beauty of the wearer,” she explains.
In 2017 Umo Designs won 9th place in the “Green Inventor”-competition organised by Sampath Bank PLC for Eco-friendly Innovators and Inventors and Udari is currently in the process of developing a new collection made from used plastic bottles.
Having started this venture as a hobby and side business while she was in university, Udari is now on a mission to make it her primary goal to create more jewellery out of different kinds of scrap. Udari can be contacted on 0710845358 for orders or visit her website https://uam093.wixsite.com/umodesigns.