Ropes, Brass, Salt, Stone: Reinventing Jewellery In Kenya - UrduPoint

Source: UrduPoint

Nairobi, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 18th Mar, 2024) Sisal ropes, salt crystals, volcanic rocks and aged brass: award-winning Kenyan designer Ami Doshi Shah has always chosen unlikely materials to make sophisticated jewellery that redefines value in a carat-obsessed industry.

"As a child, I was always finding beauty in unusual things like stones and fossils," Shah, 44, told AFP in an interview at her rooftop studio in Kenya's capital Nairobi, where she crafts her pieces by hand.

Her 2019 collection Salt of the Earth featured ropes, salt crystals and patinated blue-green brass, and was showcased in exhibitions at London's Victoria and Albert Museum and New York's Brooklyn Museum.

But despite earning a university degree in jewellery and silversmithing in the British city of Birmingham and the prestigious Goldsmiths award for best apprentice designer, Shah said it took her years to fully commit to her metier.

A third-generation Kenyan of South Asian origin, she interned at Indian jewellers such as The Gem Palace, whose patrons have included Princess Diana, Oprah Winfrey and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Traditional Indian ideas of jewellery as a luxury investment did not resonate with her. And she wasn't wholly sure of how to marry her experimental sensibility with commercial pressures.

She took a sabbatical during her second pregnancy and began a year-long artist residency at the non-profit Kuona Trust in Nairobi in 2014-15.

It was a cathartic period, yet one also "filled with self-doubt", she said.

"I was worried whether people would like my work... it is hard to accept that you might not be a commercial success, especially when you have spent so many years focused on making money."

She established her brand in 2015, with a view to creating bold, sculptural pieces that reflect the talismanic role of jewellery in Kenyan culture, where it is used in rites of passage, for protection and to imbue the wearer with strength.

Her body of work ranges from sisal neckpieces to cuffs inlaid with stones and brass earrings that sway with every movement.

"That was the first time I felt like jewellery could be political, like it could be a thread connecting so many things," she said.

"I feel far more Kenyan than Indian," she said, urging her South Asian-origin compatriots to embrace integration, instead of finding safety in self-segregation, decades after the traumatic 1972 expulsion of South Asians from Uganda.

With recent forays into furniture, her dream is to build a multi-disciplinary studio with "predominantly Kenyan" designers.

"It's important to be able to tell our own story in our own way instead of having a narrative projected onto us."