Turning waste and wild materials into lighting

In the Kodagu Café domestic lounge at Bengaluru airport, a soft, diffused light spills from sculptural towers made of what looks like bentwood and parchment. These lamps, crafted from an invasive weed called lantana camara and banana fibre paper, are part of a site-specific installation titled Gaia Pillars of Light by Oorjaa, a Bangalore-based lighting studio that works at the intersection of design, sustainability and craft. The form is inspired by South Indian temple pillars but the materials and methods are deeply contemporary—part lighting, part environmental statement.

For this edition of The Way We Make, Beautiful Homes spends a day at Oorjaa’s sun-dappled studio in Bangalore to witness the many hands and minds behind the Gaia Pillar Lamp. In our conversation with Jenny Pinto, we go deeper into her practice, the evolution of the studio and the ideas that shape Oorjaa’s luminous, sustainable designs. Edited excerpts from the interview:

Beautiful Homes (BH): What led you to leave a career in advertising and start working with handmade paper and lighting?

Jenny Pinto (JP): I was born and raised in Bombay and worked in advertising for years, making TV commercials. But somewhere in the mid-1990s, I began to feel a disconnect between what I was doing and what I cared about. Advertising drives consumption and with that comes waste. As India liberalised and consumption grew, the environmental impact became impossible to ignore. Around the same time, I became a mother and that made the questions sharper—what kind of world would my child inherit?

I wasn’t an activist—I didn’t see myself holding up banners—but I thought, if India is going to be a consumer economy, can we meet that demand with products that are sustainable, local and handmade? So I decided to step away. I shut down my company, moved to Bangalore and gave myself time to explore. I began experimenting with handmade paper, using banana fibre sourced from agricultural waste. And the more I worked with it, the more I saw its potential with light. That was the beginning of Oorjaa. I always say the path was winding but so is life.

BH: You’ve called Oorjaa “an exploration of light.” How does that idea play out in your material choices and designs?

JP: We don’t begin with a form and then go looking for what can be used to achieve it—we begin by spending time with the material and understanding what it wants to do. With banana fibre, the paper has a beautiful translucency that naturally lends itself to lighting. It’s strong yet delicate. With lantana, it was different. It’s a wild, invasive plant that’s dense and fibrous but it has strength, and flexibility. Once we started experimenting, we realised it could be shaped, curved and layered to create forms that held both structure and softness.

BH: Sustainability at Oorjaa seems to go beyond just material choices. Can you share some of the behind-the-scenes decisions that reflect the approach?

JP: It’s everywhere in how we process, source and build. Papermaking requires a lot of water, so we harvest rainwater and reuse it as much as possible. Our old studio, built with architect Chitra Vishwanath, was one of Bangalore’s first green buildings. We harvested rainwater, recycled wastewater, used no chemicals in our paper and designed the space for natural light and ventilation.

We reuse all offcuts. Broken lamps are turned into new materials. We package everything using coconut coir and paper tape. Even our supply chain is local—most materials come from within 200 km. Sustainability is a habit and it shows up in the small things.

BH: You’ve worked with banana fibre, quarry dust, cork and now lantana. What’s next?

JP: I’m always looking at waste, not just as a problem but as a beginning. Quarry dust came from granite polishing units. We mixed it with paper pulp to make what we call “faux cement”, a material that looks like concrete but uses industrial byproduct.