Semente

Before it was called paisley, the motif was the boteh — Persian for shrub, or shoot. It began, in other words, as a growing thing. Its earliest forms appear in Persia and Central Asia, and can be traced to around 550 BC.

The curved drop has been read many ways: a cypress bent by the wind and joined to a floral spray, standing for life and eternity; or the sacred Zoroastrian flame. In India it gathered further readings — the mango, the cashew, the shoot of the date palm — all of them symbols of fertility and abundance. Wherever it arrived, it meant that something was growing.

Semente follows the route rather than the print. Our language is textile and stone, and our homage is always to Brazil. What these pieces take is what the boteh gathered on its way: the shrub and the shoot it was named for, the symbols of fertility it acquired in India, the carved beads it travelled alongside.

Amethyst, citrine, rose quartz and aquamarine — a homage to Brazilian gemology — are cut here as melon beads, the fluted form the pitanga already has. Twenty-five centuries after Persia, the shape comes to rest in a Brazilian garden.