Handful of seeds, a wire, and an artistic touch! What you have is a piece of jewellery straight from the lap of Nature. Amongst us, we have a self-taught artist who has since 2005 been perfecting the art of creating magic with hand picked seeds.
Hailing from Ajmer, Rajasthan, Ramawtar belonged to a farming background which held little attraction to the free-body that he was. Today the naturalist, explores, experiments and uses his innovative ideas to give back to nature what he finds.
A school-walk out, Ramawtar has tried his hands at many a professions including teaching. He taught at the Barefoot College, an NGO and supervised their 150 schools across five districts of Rajasthan. In 2003 the young lad moved to Udaipur and joined Shikshantar –where he worked for six years.
Initially Ramawtar would collect seeds for gardening and help city dwellers in Udaipur set up kitchen gardens in their yard or terrace. Soon, he realized, “how beautiful some were; all different from each other in colour, size, hue, shape and I wondered what all we could do with them and felt inspired to use them,” and he ended up making seed jewellery.
Here comes the Uttarakhand connect! Soon his love for the outdoors brought the young man to Jim Corbett National Park, Uttarakhand, where he enjoyed a stance at bird watching, and fell in love with the environs and ended up residing here.
“For my jewellery, I look outdoors. With experience I have zeroed down on durable, unique shape, interesting hues of seeds such as reetha, red-sandalwood tree, Indian screw tree, tiger claws, sword bean as well as pods, feathers, sea shells, coconut shells too,” strung together with copper or brass wire, your beautiful eco-friendly, organic jewellery is ready to be worn.
When not creating something beautiful, Ramawtar is on the move teaching the art of turning natural bounty into items of simple beauty. He encourages his students to treat their outdoors as a virtual art gallery. In a time when silver and gold jewellery are out of reach, how about turning to eco-friendly jewellery?
