I ran this shop as Oyster Bay a while. It was a name I chose because I liked how it sounded.
SAKRI is the one I was given.
For years I strung my pearls on wire. In April I started knotting them instead, a knot of silk between every pearl, tied by hand, so that each pearl sits on its own.
A necklace takes an hour or two, and around fifty knots.
I make every clasp by hand in sterling silver. No two are the same.
This summer I went to Bali. While I was there I had a lontar reading, a reading drawn from palm-leaf manuscripts, inscribed by hand in Balinese script. It is a practice much older than me, and it isn't mine.
I was told two things. That I was born under Batara Sakri. And that I should bring my spirituality into my work.
Sakri comes from a Sanskrit root, śak - to be able. To have the capacity to make something. It is the same root that gives śakti, and the same root behind Śakra, one of the names for Indra.
In the Javanese and Balinese retellings of the Mahabharata, Sakri is an ancestor, a sage, father of Palasara, grandfather of Vyasa.
And then there is the net.
The Avataṃsaka Sūtra mentions a net belonging to Indra, stretching out infinitely in every direction, with a jewel at every knot. It was the Huayan teachers of Tang-dynasty China, Fazang above all, who developed the image: every jewel reflects every other jewel in the net, and all of their reflections, without end. Nothing in it stands alone.
A net. A jewel at every knot.
I started tying the knots in April, a few months before I was given the name.
Same hands. Same table in Copenhagen. Every piece you already own is a SAKRI piece, nothing was discontinued, nothing was replaced.
Only the name on the box is different.
- Victoria