Ropes, brass, salt, stone: Reinventing jewelery in Kenya
Sisal ropes, salt crystals, volcanic rocks and aged brass: award-winning Kenyan designer Ami Doshi Shah has always chosen unlikely materials to make sophisticated jewelery 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…