Ami Doshi Shah reveals her new and most personal collection to date, Memento Mori. The Kenyan applied artist and jewellery designer took a hiatus during the pandemic after suffering from the loss of both her father and brother in 2021. The grieving process that followed led her to reflect on the all-too-fleeting circle of life, the inevitability of death and the promise of rebirth. This lay the seeds for her to return to the studio.

“When my loved ones passed away, I spent a significant amount of time feeling either numb or in wracking sobs. Memento Mori became a conduit for the grief, the rage, the overwhelming sadness,” Doshi-Shah reflects. “If we look at the process of creating and working with our hands as a means to express thoughts and emotions, then this collection was that for me. To make something of beauty out of ugly, churning sentiment. It's a dichotomy that I found comforting.”

Doshi Shah’s starting point was a photograph of the moon that her son took on the eve before her father’s passing. From lunar cycles, she looked at talismanic rituals associated with funeral rights. Adornments have long spoken to power and protection as well as acting as heirlooms that hold generational stories. These ruminations guided her to think about the boundless state of change the universe plunges us into and how a spiritual acceptance of this evolution can deliver a potent calm. “In Eastern philosophies, once a person leaves this Earth, their spirit transitions to the ether. I drew visual inspiration from the objects connected to funerary rites (the mala or garland) and further afield to celestial bodies who find their physical manifestation in the intangible,” she explains.

These ideas resonate with her broader practice. Doshi Shah was born in Mombasa, lived in Oman and the US and studied jewellery in the UK before returning to Kenya where she launched her now-hailed brand in 2015. Her commitment to sustainability and adding value to local natural materials has seen her exhibited as part of the travelling Africa Fashion exhibition (currently on view at Brooklyn Museum) and find stockists worldwide.

For this collection, she evolved her bold aesthetic through the use of brass, oxidised copper, silver leaf, pearl and lava stone. The resulting conceptual pieces – thorny crowns, flower-like pendants, crescent-shaped earpieces and tubular chokers - have a marriage of materials and textures that act as healing tools connecting realms with their raw simplicity. “Whilst the collection is very personal, I hope that people can identify with the expression of beauty, darkness, light and violence in the pieces and in some small way understand that all those can coexist in an object, a moment and a lifetime.”

This accompanying visual story, in collaboration with photographer Shitanda and creative director Sunny Dolat, debuts here on Nataal. Shrouded by emotion, an otherworldly figure finds strength and peace armed with Doshi Shah’s elegant amulets. Shitanda says: “The imagery is an exploration and celebration of the vitality of life, the inevitability of mortality and the renewal of rebirth by capturing the essence of these transformative phases.”