MOI X PDKF at The Lavery

At London Craft Week 2026, presented at The Lavery, MOI Fine Jewelry and Princess
Gauravi Kumari’s PDKF Artisan Collective came together to open Unbound by Beads:
Migration, Memory & Material a research-led exhibition that traces the extraordinary
journey of the glass bead, from Venetian workshops to the pastoral desert communities of
western India. It asks a question MOI has long returned to: who gets remembered within
the histories of craft?

It was an evening built less like a launch and more like an offering. It opened with Diet
Paratha, a global Representative speaking about South Asian culture around the world,
setting the tone for the room. It moved through an exhibition three chapters deep, and
closed with a panel conversation between Puja Shah, Co- Founder of MOI, Princess Gauravi
Kumari, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist & General Secretary of PDKF and Manisha Kelley,
curator at V&A, that turned the room’s attention back to where it belonged.



Image: Puja Shah, Kunal Shah, co-founder of MOI, and Princess Gauravi Kumari at
Unbound by Beads, London Craft Week 2026.

London Craft Week has, in recent years, become a stage where craft from western India is
no longer explained to the West. It is placed in dialogue with it. This year, MOI chose The
Lavery, at 4 Cromwell Place, as the setting for that dialogue: intimate enough to hold a
research exhibition, warm enough to hold a conversation. The exhibition ran from 13th to
16th May 2026.

The evening opened with Diet Paratha, whose presence set an easy, unpretentious energy
for a room that was, underneath the glamour, deeply serious about its subject. It was a
fitting opening note, because Unbound by Beads never asked its audience to simply admire.
It asked them to look closer, to ask where a bead has been before it arrives on a body, and
whose memory it is still carrying.

A Collaboration Rooted in Legacy


Image: Princess Gauravi Kumari and Puja Shah in conversation with PDKF artisans in
Rajasthan

Unbound by Beads: Migration, Memory & Material is the second chapter in a research
relationship MOI has been building over two years. It began with beadwork traditions of
Kutch and Kathiawar and has now extended into Rajasthan, in partnership with the PDKF
Artisan Collective, an initiative of the Princess Diya Kumari Foundation supporting rural
women artisans across the state. At the heart of this research are the Meghwal women of
Barmer, whose craftsmanship and traditions form its central focus.

The collaboration brought together two very different kinds of expertise. MOI’s fieldwork
and material research, the same instinct that once sent the brand into the villages of Kutch
and Kathiawar, met PDKF’s long-standing relationships with artisan communities across
Rajasthan, built under the cultural stewardship of Princess Gauravi Kumari of Jaipur. The
result is an exploration that does not view craft from a distance, but engages deeply with
its makers, processes and traditions.

There is a question MOI keeps returning to: what happens to the people behind a craft once
the work enters the language of fine jewelry? The techniques may be celebrated, the objects
carefully presented and the stories beautifully told, yet the makers and the knowledge they
carry can still recede from view. Unbound by Beads was built to close that distance.

Migration, Memory & Material: Inside the Exhibition


Image: Inside the exhibition: archival beadwork, headpieces and research documentation
displayed at The Lavery.

The research-led project unfolds through three interconnected chapters, each revealing
another layer of the same story.

I . Material
A close study of the glass bead itself: where it came from, where it traveled and everything
it became along the way. The chapter traces its origins in Venetian workshops, its passage
through maritime trade routes into western India during the 19th century, and the slow,
quiet transformation that followed, from an imported material carried by merchants with
no intention of permanence into something unmistakably rooted in local craft and visual
language. Archival material, trade documentation and early beadwork sit alongside one
another here, not as artifacts under glass, but as evidence of how thoroughly a foreign
material can be absorbed into an existing visual vocabulary until its origins are almost
forgotten and its belonging becomes its own.
But a material’s history is only half the story. The other half is being written today.

II. Contemporary Practice
The critical centre of the project and, in many ways, its heart. This is where the present-day
work of the PDKF Artisan Collective comes into focus: the active craft clusters across the
deserts of western India, the Meghwal women of Barmer who continue this practice today,
and the deliberate, everyday labour that keeps a centuries-old technique alive.
More than an archive, this chapter is a record of continuity evidence that this craft is not a
relic waiting to be revived, but a living practice passed from hand to hand and generation to
generation, sustained by the communities that have carried it forward. To sustain a
tradition, this chapter suggests, is a very different act from simply preserving one.
And what is sustained, eventually, finds new form.

III. Serai Collectibles
The culmination, where research becomes wearable. A twelve-piece contemporary fine
jewelry capsule that carries this material history forward, not as a reference borrowed from
the past, but as an inheritance continued into the present. Each piece is built from the same
instinct that runs through the first two chapters: that memory and belonging are not
abstract ideas, but things that can be strung, set and worn close to the body, the same way
beadwork always has been

The Panel: Craft, Memory and Who Gets to Tell the Story

Image: Princess Gauravi Kumari, Puja Shah and Manisha Kelley on the closing panel at
Unbound by Beads.

The evening closed the way it opened, in conversation. The panel brought together Puja
Shah, co-founder of MOI; Princess Gauravi Kumari, cultural collaborator and founder of the
PDKF Artisan Collective; and Manisha Kelley, curator at V&A. Their discussion moved
beyond the objects on display and into the questions the exhibition was really asking: who
receives authorship within high-end spaces, how materials carry stories across generations,
and what it means to build a fine jewelry capsule with a community rather than simply
from it.

It was, fittingly, a conversation between three women about work built by women, for
women, and sustained through generations.

A Story That Keeps Moving

Unbound by Beads asks a question MOI has never stopped asking: what happens when a
material is allowed to keep its memory intact, even as it moves, from a Venetian workshop,
through generations of making and wearing, into a London gallery, and now into Serai :
Collectibles By MOI?

Glass beads, strung into structured grids and embroidered forms, became vessels of
memory, carrying identity, lineage and belonging across shifting landscapes. In lives defined
by migration, beadwork functioned as a kind of portable home, something fixed and known
in a life that rarely offered either. Its significance was never simply in where the material
came from, but in what people carried forward through it: knowledge, memory, identity and
craft.

The glass bead has traveled, changed hands, acquired new meanings and entered new
forms, without losing the stories and skills carried within it. What endures is not a single
place or a single expression, but the practice itself, continually passed on, adapted and
made relevant to the present.

Some things, in a world that so often flattens culture for commerce, refuse to become
merely aesthetic. This is one of them.