Geometry is poetry

At Karomi, design is often-times a poetic rendition of everyday geometrics. Circle is the point at which creation begins, Square is a 4-pointed star…and the triangle, an angled call to trinity.

A straight line is a destination unto itself and the angled curve, a secret worth uncovering.

I find drawing lines infinitely soothing. Straight lines, hatched lines, parallel or perpendicular lines…even stippled dots………I find them aaalllll soothing. When my mind is plagued by a riot of ideas…or conversely, when there isn’t one miserable idea to hold on to… I find that an elementary, uncomplicated, straightforward line will do the job. It will either be the million-dollar idea or lead me to one. One way or the other, frazzled nerves calm down, creative juices flow and the job gets done. Hallelujah!!!

My affair with lines dates way back to my formative years in art college when many hours were spent – sometimes in frustration, and sometimes in sheer awe- to find the art and the rhythm in the ordinary and the regular. This idea that even a commonplace line is a “cauldron of plentiful possibilities” was cemented further in my later years while studying textiles. Pixelating a picture helped understand that everything is “square” and interpreting a piece of music as a plethora of lines facilitated awareness that lines can be impressively expressive.

One fine day when we were starved for inspiration in the Karomi design room, I picked up a book on art history and began reading up on my ever-favourite Bauhaus movement. Bauhaus is an art and craft movement of the early 20^th century, noteworthy for its immense contribution to modern design. The foundation of the movement was inspired by the concept of “uniting art and craft”, a novel idea at the time. Bauhaus is a design philosophy that is revolutionary in its ethos, centred on stepping away from the norm and daring to think different.

Wanting to design different and always a big fan of Bauhaus, the more I read, the clearer became the way forward. It felt so natural…it was like the mother ship returning home. The idea of reimagining the basic square, circle and triangle as components of design appealed to me. To deconstruct a design and retain only its essence…to weave a web of complex patterns and create depths in layers using simple straight lines…to see the elegance in an angled curve and the magic in a ubiquitous dot…aaallll appealed to me. And what appealed the most was the idea of marrying this new found idea with the age-old craft, Jamdani. And I knew that with our knowledge of the loom and the yarn and the dye and all things textiles, the resultant fabric would both dazzle and deliver.

 And it did… and continues to do so till date.

This ability to see poetry in geometry freed me. In every sense of the word, it truly freed me. I feel unconstrained. Mandalas of Raza, abstractions of Klee and stick figures of Miro charm and tempt. Freedom and direction, a rare combination!! A world of possibilities opened up the day that my love affair with geometrics began…the most faithful and reliable…the longest relationship I have ever had.

 Aham Karomi