Fresh from my recent trip to India, I spent an afternoon in the V&A museum's Indian galleries, and there, in a small cabinet on the side, was a gold necklace. Unusually the necklace was threaded on a heavy black cord, almost a rope. Along its length, evenly spaced, were golden amulets with wonderfully deeply-engraved textures and all of them with differing outlines. As I read about it from the notes inside the cabinet, I learnt that it had come from southern India - as part of a dowry. The gold pendants, I realised, represented seed pods.

Slowly I walked back across London to the studio to ponder on the idea.

Sometime later I asked Nick Barnard - the keeper of metalwork at the V&A if I could possibly look at it more closely. And also if they had any background information on the jewel and its history. I came back after a few weeks and, carefully putting on some gloves, I was allowed to handle the jewel.

It was lighter and more delicate than it had seemed in the cabinet. The gold gave the feeling of being old and treasured and the seed pods seemed more like a series of lockets with secret inner stories.

On another table behind, Nick had laid out some documents about the history of this type of Marriage necklace with the individual Thali (charms) from Southern India.

I 'disappeared' for a while into another world of exotic spices, markets, and engraved gold. The spices, fruits and seed in the necklace were (in no particular order): aniseed, Tulasi-Madaam (sacred basil and very common in India), mango, plantain, coconut, brinjal, coriander, almonds, melon and nutmeg.