Marquetry Butterfly in Five Woods by Haris, Bengaluru

Haris is a student at Permanent Objects, a bespoke furniture studio in Bengaluru, Karnataka, and his brief from the studio was open: make something out of scrap. He chose marquetry and spent about a week turning thin offcut veneers into a palm-sized butterfly mounted on a small teak block. Ebony forms the black sections of the wings, maple the white spots, Canadian cedar the ochre tones, rosewood the body, and teak the base. The eyes, the legs and the coiled proboscis were cut and shaped the same way. Each piece locks into its neighbour by double bevel cutting. When the piece was done, he finished it in colourless LEINOS Interior Hardwax Oil 290, the same oil the studio uses on its own bespoke furniture. It adds no colour of its own; it brings forward the colour already present in each species.

The hard part, in Haris's words, was learning what the material would allow. Some species tore under the blade, and the cutting order came from trial and error before the pieces held. With double bevel cutting the angle of the blade does the fitting, so each cut piece sits into the next with barely a visible seam. On a piece like this the finish has almost nothing to do except stay out of the way: a colourless oil soaks into the veneer instead of sitting on it as a film, so the ebony reads black, the maple pale, and the cedar grain keeps its texture under the wing veins carved with a rotary tool. As Haris put it, "the colour and texture come straight from the material itself, no paint, no dye, nothing added."