On the eastern coast of India, near Puri, a tale recalls beaches where the tide once left shells in immense quantities, layering nacre and fragments into a shoreline shaped by the sea. From this abundance, the craft of mother of pearl in India is said to have begun transforming what the ocean delivered into objects of reflection and light.

Æquō proposed this storytelling as a starting point for Inderjeet Sandhu. An Indo-Dutch designer based in Rotterdam, Sandhu was invited to revisit the idea of accumulation as a sculptural process, as homage to the imagined shores of Puri. He turned to mother of pearl - a material he had long wished to explore - as a point of connection to both matter and ancestry.

In collaboration with shell artisans Kinkar Ghosh and his nephew Souvik Roy, originally from a village near Calcutta, the project was further developed during a residency in central India, where Æquō established a workshop in the midst of nature to create the conditions for this collection to take shape.

There, a series of monumental vases, conceived by Sandhu, were realised through aggregation: fragments joined, curved, fused until they appear almost grown rather than assembled. Each vase bears the labour of many hands — structural sculpting, the delicate placement of shell after shell, and the long act of polishing that draws iridescence from opacity.

Each vase bears the labour of many hands structural sculpting, the delicate placement of shell after shell, and the long act of polishing that draws iridescence from opacity. The resulting forms are both marine and architectural — some folding inward like hollowed vessels, others thrusting outward as if swelling with tide.

Surfaces gleam with the illusion of having just emerged from water , relics worn smooth by currents and then re-sculpted by human intent. The collection positions mother of pearl not as ornament but as structural language; a meditation on how fragments, time, and the sea can be given new coherence. It embodies Æquō’s vision of connecting worlds, engaging Indian craft traditions within a contemporary design language, and allowing material histories to resurface as present form.