Fuel to the Fire

When two creative worlds meet, something luminous takes form. One shaped by architecture and clay, the other by colour and abstraction; each carrying its own rhythm, discipline and desire. At Studio Mandala in Auroville, these sensibilities began to speak to one another: earth meeting pigment, patience meeting pulse. The collaboration unfolded through curiosity rather than design. Clay discovered colour’s daring; paint found a new tactility in form. The terra earth of Auroville met the chromatic spirit of Paris, and both listened, learned, and transformed. Then shimmer entered the conversation… “Let’s add some bling!”, said Sujata. And touches of gold and silver, never before used in the studio as post firing techniques, crept in to the vocabulary, as did nitrocellulose gels and metallic lustres as new star-cast members!
In our collection for Fuel to the Fire, we have two carousels that spin on an axis, and sets of platters and shields perched quietly on the wall. Each piece that emerged, is characterised by its own intrinsic joie de vivre, carrying both restraint and exuberance, gesture and structure, stillness and spark; an amalgam of both our aesthetics, widening the boundaries of both our practices.
All art, we believe, springs from a shared source; a desire to give emotion a tangible form through rhythm, light and material. Working together reminded us that creativity thrives in connection, where one vision becomes a mirror for another. Auroville’s quiet idealism shaped the work too; its forested calm and sense of community giving breath to every form. What remains is a collection born of trust and play, of clay that learned to bling and colour that learned to rest.
“Finally,’, says Sujata, “I realised Adil truly wanted to collaborate with me; his faith, his wish, his desire to work with me, brought me to Auroville. This meeting of fire and light, earth and imagination, became something neither of us could have made alone.”
In that quiet space between difference and discovery, this body of work found its form, its joie de vivre!