Sally Dudmesh made her first necklace at the age of thirteen, inspired
by the bead markets of Accra in Ghana. With her tobacco planter parents,
she spent her childhood roaming the globe, from Pakistan where she was
born, to Singapore and Mauritius.
Trips to Yemen where the Bedouin were decked in heavy jewellery marked
the beginning of an obsession with silver and as her collection increased,
so did her yearning to create her own designs. Taught by the silversmiths
in Cairo, she learned the skills to fashion her own inimitable style,
mixing the influences of Arabia, Asia and Africa. Exotic trips to enhance
her degree studies in history of art and anthropology were financed
by her jewellery and an unusual 18th birthday present of a trip to Kenya
was to prove a watershed.
At the age of nineteen Dudmesh lived with the Massai for six months,
ostensibly studying the pressures on their culture applied by modernity
but found herself fascinated by the maintenance of tribal tradition
through complex bead work and self adornment.
She has spent the last twenty years travelling extensively across Africa
as an anthropologist, surviving numerous adventures including a close
encounter with an irate buffalo, but has recently been converted to
the lustrous possibilities of gold and gemstones and taken up residence
in a crumbling palace in Rajasthan where she has established a new workshop.
She now divides her time between India, England, the remote bush of
Northern Kenya where she still disappears on safari for lengthy periods
and the Ngong Dairy - her home in Nairobi (which doubled as Karen Blixen’s
house in the film Out of Africa). Here she works with a co-operative
of Massai women who are the backbone of her beading operation, and a
goldsmith who works alongside her.
Her latest collections are derived both from her studies of Roman, Etruscan
and Ancient Egyptian jewellery in the British Museum and by the inspiration
she derives from the worldwide significance placed in amulets.
Her travels take her to remote corners of the world in search of jewels
and she describes herself ruefully as “totally uncontrollable
about beads.”