I stubbled across a painting I made when I was maybe 4/5 years old of a vase with flowers spilling out of it. Colours everywhere, taking up space without apology. I don't remember making it, but I have it still, and kept it with my special photos of childhood for a reason. This messy, joyful, completely unselfconscious thing that a small child made before she knew anything about craft or meaning or how the world would ask her to justify what she creates. I have spent the last ten years trying to find my way back to her.
We're all born naturally creative and some how life beats that pure flow of creative spirit out of us.
"Every child is an artist. The problem is staying an artist when you grow up."
Pablo Picasso
The Guldasta - the flower vase or bouquet of flowers is a motif that appears everywhere in Mughal architecture, in Persian tilework, in the palaces and temples of Jaipur. A vessel, abundant and overflowing, symbolising paradise on earth, holding something living and beautiful and always in the act of becoming. I encountered it everywhere on my trip to India earlier this year, and slowly, quietly, it began to feel less like a design reference and more like a mirror.
"The popularity of the Guldasta reached its height during the reigns of Emperor Jahangir and Shah Jahan, when naturalistic floral art became a defining feature of Mughal aesthetics. Inspired by Persian artistic traditions and the imperial gardens of the Mughal court, these floral bouquets symbolized abundance, prosperity, and the gardens of Paradise described in Islamic tradition. The Guldasta was not merely decoration, it was architecture in bloom, a stone bouquet meant to last forever." @itihassnama
I think the Guldasta has always been my shape. I have been building a Guldasta. And what's flowering out of it right now is the most personal work I have ever made.
Not just as a motif. As a way of understanding what I've been building here, in this studio, over the last decade. A vessel strong enough to hold everything. The grief and the joy, the heritage and the healing. The identity questions and the creative obsessions and the deep, abiding love for the jewellery of women who carried their whole lives on their bodies across borders and oceans.
Before I came home from India, I visited the village where my Baa was born. Not where she grew up but the village where she was actually born in, where her mother's material home was. Standing in the place where she began. Thinking about the lineage of women I come from, their strength, their resilience, the gold they carried and what it meant. Thinking, too, about the future. About what I hope to carry forward. About the going back before the going forward. The honouring of where I come from before I step into what comes next. Although I didn't plan for that trip to be a pilgrimage, that's what it naturally became. The collection I have been making since I came home was born in that space; the tenderness, the not-yet, the things I'm holding privately in the depths of the Guldasta vase ready to bloom, half bloomed and some parts in full bloom.
I don't have a name for this collection yet. Names, I've learned, arrive when something is ready to be fully known. What I do have is a motif — The Guldasta — that has become the key that unlocked everything.
When I picture these pieces I feel them before I see them. Running my fingers over the surface. The warmth of the wood, the cool of the pearl. Wearing them at my ear, at my neck. Grounded. Safe. Sensory in a way that feels like coming home to my own body.
I have been making this slowly. More slowly than anything before. And I am learning to trust that the slowness is not a failure. That the depth that comes from sitting with something, returning to it, letting it develop in its own time, is exactly what makes it worth wearing.
Something has shifted in me this year. After a decade of putting this business at the forefront of everything, life is asking me to come first for a while. Something personal and profound is taking priority. And rather than fighting that, than pushing through and performing a version of productivity I don't currently have access to, I am trying my best to honour it.
I built this business to be able to do that. The archiving of older work. The price increases that reflect the true value of what I make. The move toward a smaller, more intentional range. I did all of that so that this studio could hold my whole life. Including the parts that have nothing to do with work.
The Guldasta holds everything, messy and free like my childhood painting but also beautiful and fragrant like the Mughal and Persian motif. That is the whole point of it.
There is something I keep coming back to from my time in India. Sitting in a small room in Jaipur, watching a Meenakari artist work, understanding that before he lit the fire, before a single piece took shape, he paused and called on something larger than himself to be present in the process.
I have been doing that too, in my own way, without always knowing it. The shrine in my studio. The intention I carry into every piece. The way this work has always moved with my inner life rather than against it. I am calling on her now. The divine feminine. The force that moves through making as devotion and love. Asking her to be present in this work.
To move through the materials, the laser as it engraves the wood, my hands as I make and land softly on the woman who one day wears it.
And somewhere, there is a 4 year old with paint on her hands, flowers spilling out of a vase, taking up space without apology. I think she always knew.
The new collection is coming. Small, intentional, made slowly and with everything I have. More soon. With love, Anisha x
Photography by Tess Viera
