Sacred Abundance

The Story

Sacred Abundance is built as an architecture rather than a portrait. The composition rises in tiers on a black ground: attendant figures in arched niches at the crown, the word svagatam, meaning welcome, stitched in gold beneath them, then a temple facade with its columns and mirrored bird-forms, and finally Lakshmi herself at the base, seated on a great rose lotus with a lotus in one hand, a jewel in another, and her lower palms open in the gestures of fearlessness and giving. Two pink tigers flank her, calm rather than guarding. Along the very bottom the mantra oṃ śrī-mahā-lakṣmyai namaḥ runs in red, in Roman and Devanagari both. Read from the top down, the piece is a descent from the heavens to a threshold you are being invited across.

The density is the point. The black ground is pricked with thousands of tiny white and silver points so it holds depth rather than flatness, and the figures are built almost entirely from beadwork: the lotus in graduated rose bugle beads laid petal by petal, the tigers striped in pink and gunmetal, coral bead garlands looping across the field, gold zari suns, stars and butterflies scattered at the margins. Sequins, mirrors and cut stones sit where the light needs to catch. Every element is placed by hand; nothing is printed or machine-assisted.

Sacred Abundance is part of KURU's Sacred Threads collection, created under the artistic direction of Shantnu Sihag, trained at Istituto Marangoni and Rubelli Venice. Each artwork is entirely hand-embroidered, and the intricacy of materials and technique means no two pieces can ever be truly identical. Every artwork carries its own character, impossible to replicate exactly by hand, and is accompanied by a signed Certificate of Authenticity.