Planetoid

Planetoid is a shop for Ranura’s brand which aims to elevate traditional Sri Lankan hand weaving by turning it into luxury clothing and textiles. Their traditional weaving is largely inspired by the landscape as they take many colours and patterns from the surrounding nature. Ranura enjoys depicting his clothing in nonchalant ways outdoors, including in water. The walls replicate the texture of rain drops on water and the floor has the shine and colour of water, which is a prevalent feature in the Sri Lankan landscape. The project began with the exploration of paper becoming hard and straw being soft. This led to the creation of a paper based construction material which is inspired by a paper mache paste recipe that turns solid when it dries. With inspiration from traditional Japanese shoji screens, which use paper to let the light in, transparency became a driving concept of the project. There are varying levels of literal transparency in the form of a straw screen, which allows the viewer to look inside but not enter, and the semi transparent holes in the wall panels, which allow light to penetrate and moving shadows to be seen. Phenomenal transparency influenced the spacial arrangement and is the idea of simultaneous perceptions of different spatial locations by alluding to a grid but then breaking it, allowing the planes created to invade each other, leading to seemingly impossible spatial qualities, which can be experienced throughout the space.