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Makila Nsika (M.Kala): Pattern, Texture, Ornament

New Ashgate Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Makila Nsika (M.Kala), winner of the Rising Stars 2025 Award.

The exhibition brings together new jewellery and object-based work shaped by Makila's ongoing research into pattern, repetition, and surface, developed through careful making and collaboration.

Makila is a London-based teacher, designer and jeweller whose practice connects contemporary jewellery with cultural heritage and responsible material choices. Her use of stones is now focused within a single collection, using lab-grown diamonds and potentially other lab-grown stones. Alongside this collection, Makila has developed a series of rings with hand-textured surfaces made in collaboration with an artisan, where tactile pattern becomes the main visual and conceptual language.

The exhibition also introduces a larger-scale work in development using raffia, drawing on histories of body ornament. This new piece considers ornament as a social and cultural structure that can frame, reveal, or obscure the body, informed by Makila's dual cultural inheritance, African and European.

A selection of work will be available to buy, offering collectors the chance to acquire pieces from an emerging practice at a key stage of growth.