Settling down within the café adjoining the buzzing courtyard of Sabha, Jenny Pinto seems to be barely bemused. “We didn’t expect such a huge success,” the designer says candidly. “I’m quite overwhelmed by this.”
Part of the rationale might be the venue. A superbly reimagined and renovated area courting again to the late nineteenth century — in its final avatar, it was a faculty — the exhibition corridor, the auditorium and the courtyard serve distinct features but tie in effectively collectively when Sabha hosts a significant present, just like the Shades of Green at present underway. But it’s extra probably that almost all of the credit score is because of Pinto herself: again within the Nineteen Nineties, the town had taken her shiny thoughts and progressive concepts underneath its wing, simply as it could tech founders a decade later, and given her life a brand new path by introducing her to handmade paper artwork. And because the tech sector would acknowledge, people who Bengaluru owns, it by no means lets go.
At the flip of the century, Pinto was presumably the only real such artist in India. Today, her staff of 70 has put collectively Shades of Green, a multidimensional assemble of “dialogue, discovery and design”, the spotlight of which is undoubtedly her paper artwork mild installations. The 52-piece exhibition is as wondrous and surreal as it’s tactile and sensible.
Surreal but pure
Bathed within the heat glow and deep shadows of the lights — ground lamps formed like a star anise plant or an Illawara flower, pendant lamps impressed by a falling flame of the forest or a nonetheless cloud, desk lamps that seem like one thing collected from the ocean ground — design college students, younger youngsters, and their dad and mom transfer about as if in an enchanted land, touching the positive folds of the banana fibre, the exhausting nailed lantana bark, the suspended rings made of industrial waste.
Much of the design inspiration comes from Pinto’s e-book The Magical Everything (2024), written to introduce middle- and high-schoolers to the environmental and local weather disaster threatening the world at the moment. “My product design has always been abstract and organic,” says Pinto, “and that was the brief for this exhibition as well. About 20% of the designs are new — the gulmohars, the coral tree, the clouds — while the rest have been showcased elsewhere, though never before in Bengaluru.”
Jenny Pinto
Consider the giant Victoria water lilies, towering over guests in a room main off the principle exhibition corridor. Softly uplit proper the place the waste copper wire stem touches the core of the flower, crafted from banana fibre paper, it’s a silently transportive work, taking the observer into the depths of the river for a uncommon look at the underside of the leaf. The paper, rigorously creased into a big uneven round form, is as natural because the plant it evokes. Or take the suspended clouds, an enchanting stability of opaque paper and netted translucence, that handle to seize the non-corporeality of a lazy summer time sky. The creases that characterise the water lilies fade away to smoothness right here, interspersed with a loosely woven model of the identical materials.
The early days
It isn’t any coincidence that Pinto’s work simulates the pure world, utilizing waste materials to offer again one thing lovely and valuable: her total oeuvre, it might be stated, is each a response and a response to the overconsumption and extravagance she witnessed — and admittedly inspired, as half of the promoting business in Mumbai within the years round liberalisation. Almost in a single day, she says, she observed trash construct up within the metropolis. And then, across the similar time, she turned a mom and “suddenly, the problems became personal”.
As half of her response, Pinto shut down her enterprise producing and directing advert movies, pulled up her roots in Mumbai and moved to what was nonetheless Bangalore and, maybe most decisively, admitted her daughter at the J. Krishnamurthi-founded Valley School. The faculty provided her a kiln and a studio to work with — pottery was Pinto’s inventive curiosity at this level — until, in the future, she wandered right into a paper-making workshop, and instantly fell in love.
Starting with recycling waste paper after which working with abacá, a species of banana, in a three-month stint with U.S. papermaker Helen Heibert, Pinto got here again to India to start the arduous course of of establishing suppliers for her artwork. “Only some banana fibre was used in rope-making etc, back then, the rest of it was mulched,” she recollects. “Today [demand for banana fibre has shot up so much], it’s an industry.”
Showing up for accountable creation
For the previous twenty years, Pinto has experimented with all types of invasive and renewable crops for her work, all the time aware of sourcing, creating and producing to generate the least quantity of waste. Besides banana fibre, which she is maybe most well-known for, she additionally works with cork, fake cement (made of stone quarry waste), lantana camara, water hyacinth (each invasive species), and banana bark yarn.
While Pinto had all the time produced her work for the market, a turning level got here in 2013, when Radheesh Shetty of Bengaluru-based The Purple Turtles, her principal retailer, provided her a partnership. Together, they launched Oorja, a sustainable lighting model. The enterprise introduced scale to Pinto’s work, because the numbers swelled from about eight staff to the 70-odd at the moment, together with 5 designers.
For all her success at the moment, although, Pinto believes Indian artwork has barely recognised the potential of waste-born paper for its materiality. That will probably be her subsequent frontier, she guarantees, taking on training on circularity and ecology, in colleges in addition to for design college students. She additionally plans to carry the Paper Biennale — a recurring exhibition of worldwide artists — to India in 2027. The time has come, she thinks, to show the web page on accountable creation.
Shades of Green: A Week of Design, Dialogue and Material Stories is on at Sabha, Kamaraj Road, Bengaluru, until August 13.
The author and editor relies in Bengaluru.
Published – August 12, 2025 07:00 pm IST
