Emefa Cole

 

She was born in Sunyani, West-Central Ghana, in 1979. Her childhood was spent in Ghana with its lush vegetation and wildlife, its vibrant culture and traditions, and the close presence of gold which she recalls sometimes glintingly revealed after heavy rains. She moved to London aged twelve and completed her education there, graduating from London Metropolitan University’s Cass School of Art with a degree in Silversmithing and Jewellery.  The experimentation and discipline of art school was followed by solitary evenings in her workshop, balancing a full-time job and motherhood with a parallel life as a jeweller. It was a period of intense and relentless graft - as she describes it, she was a perfectionist and always her own harshest critic. 

Her work came to wider public notice with the BBC television series ‘Secrets of the Museum’ in 2020 which traced the Victoria and Albert Museum’s recent acquisition of a ring from her Vulcan series. That same year she began her continuing apprenticeship with the royal goldsmith to the Asantahene in Kumasi. She is one of very few women to be granted admission to this workshop to learn ancient Ashanti goldsmithing and casting techniques. Alongside studio work, her engagement with the V&A deepened when she was appointed the first curator for diaspora jewellery, a post she has held from 2022 to 2025. Hers is a quest underpinned by passion, driven equally by the practical and the intellectual, the inspirational and the theoretical.

The grandeur and power of nature, either as a seismic force or through the slow erosive action of the elements, defines much of Emefa’s work. This awareness is rooted in her observation of the natural world as a child in Ghana. She is fascinated by what lies beneath the surface, focusing on the cracks and fissures of the earth’s crust. Her rings, of blackened silver or bronze, their inner craters lined with gold or sprinkled with glinting gemstones, or their smooth bulbous bezels cast in gold and filled to overflowing with fragments of lapis lazuli, draw out the beauty and mystery of nature’s power. Although these forces, unpredictable and beyond the control of mankind, can be cruel and destructive, here nature’s regenerative powers predominate and her work conveys nature’s overriding richness, its abundance and plenty. A slower pattern of erosion can be seen in the irregular, worn profiles of her earrings, some with the gleaming surface cut away to reveal a stippled, fractured texture beneath.

These are sculptural forms, made using traditional techniques of wax carving and lost-wax casting. The gradual emergence of the jewel from a block of wax as the steel painstakingly files it into being echoes the process of erosion in nature. A drawing might provide a guide, but it is from the feel of the wax model in her hand that she knows it is complete. A mould is made around the carved wax which is then heated to allow the wax to melt and be drained away. Into this cavity is poured the molten metal which takes the form and texture of the wax model now lost. Her gold is always single mine origin and traceable; her silver is reclaimed from medical X-ray transparencies from the UK’s National Health Service.

Emefa’s jewellery has a beauty that is both bold and subtle, and a softness and tactility that belies its size. Her proportions are judged with an excellence of line and balance which works regardless of scale. Substantial and sometimes weighty, her jewellery is a delight to wear for its innate beauty and for the ease with which it sits on the body. Her jewellery is in the permanent collection of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths. It has been featured widely in the media, from Vogue to The Financial Times, and perhaps most visibly at New York’s Met Gala of 2023 when it was worn by Michaela Coel and Tristram Hunt, and in 2025 when worn by Lauryn Hill.

 

Clare Phillips, London