WElcome to my creative home
You are invited
to meander through a garden of enamelled wearable art and paintings,
explore my written musings in my blog and personal symbol library
and browse through my online shop.
I Am a Multidisciplinary Artist working in jewellery, enamel & painting.
I am also
a storyteller, a translator, an alchemist and a so(u)rceress.
I use my art as a medium to tap into Source, to tell stories, to translate the invisible into the visible 3D, to transmute darkness into light, and to inspire myself and others to become more sourced in Nature.
My story
I was born into a German-South-African-Hungarian family in Cape Town, South Africa.
As a child, I had an extremely vivid imagination. I could tap into that other, limitless realm and jump between worlds with ease. We lived on a farm where I spent much time outdoors, steeped in the ecosystems around me.
I expressed my feelings in a creative explosion of drawings and paintings that littered my bedroom floor, populated my dreams and crawled into the margins of my school books.
After completing high school, I chose to study contemporary jewellery design at Stellenbosch University. Here, during my third year, I fell in love with the vivid world of enamelling – a path I have been following ever since. I dove even deeper during a Masters Degree in Visual Arts (Jewellery) and set up my own studio after graduating.
During my first year at university, an unexpected bone cancer diagnosis forced me to face my own mortality in a way that shifted my perception of the world profoundly and redirected my priorities. While I am continuing to integrate my past experiences, they were and are the greatest gift to date: They offered such clarity. I felt guided. I learned to sharpen my intuition and forge my own path - between disciplines, between countries, between the invisible and the visible.
In 2016, I moved to Berlin, where I began to establish myself as an artist, exhibiting in Germany and internationally on a regular basis. After four vibrant years in the German capital, I relocated to the picturesque Franconian town of Bamberg. Here, in 2021, my husband Alvaro-Luca Ellwart and I opened our joint studio-gallery Atelier NONNE 11.
My creative practice:
A Jewelled Paradise Garden
Through my creative practice, I have begun to open a window into an imaginary garden where botanical and animal shapes merge to form a unique visual language. My work speaks of an enchanted inner space, of dissolving boundaries between artistic disciplines, of an eternal paradisiacal garden, both dark and light, melancholy and vibrant, alive and decaying, with daring colours, three-dimensional use of space and fascinating detail.
Gardens can be metaphors for identities, always growing, evolving, spilling over their confinements. The image of the garden unites the desire to organize and discipline the world - that need for precise borders - with the equally human urge to be unconstrained, wild, free and breaking through boundaries.
While the garden underpins my work in every respect, lately my attention has been captured by the invisible connections between everything in the garden, that energetic hum of animals, plants, microbes, fungi and humans in collaboration.
Atelier NONNE 11:
A Creative Home
Atelier NONNE 11, situated in the heart of Bamberg in Germany, is a unique space - not only as a contemporary jewellery workshop and showroom, but also as a platform for exhibitions, concerts, performances, artist talks, and generally art-related endeavours across different disciplines. Here, Alvaro and I manifested our vision for a space where we could create, exhibit and sell our art directly. We wanted to offer an accessible portal to our world of meaning-making, where unsuspecting passers-by could allow themselves to become intrigued. In addition, we needed a meeting point, a space for conversation and connection and possibility.
Craftsmanship as a devotional practice
To me, my creative craft can become like a prayer: This mixture of meditation and intentional manifesting expresses my gratitude for a joyful way of living, my reverence for the skilled craft traditions that have come before me, and my devotion to Mother Earth who has birthed everyone and everything. This emotional alchemy is captured in my work in a specific frequency of love and abundance, so that you – holding this object – may feel your heart expand and your entire being fill up with light.
Why enamel?
I have become absolutely enchanted by the art of enamelling (essentially fusing glass onto metal). A variety of different enamelling techniques and protocols offer endless possibilities in terms of the texture, colour and quality of the finished piece. But while the glossy colours are absolutely irresistible, it has been the process of enamelling itself that has truly captivated me.
This creative process, with its vivid colour possibilities, its laborious ritualistic methods and its ties to alchemical practices, inspires a creative drive in me that compels me to make. The making, in its quality of searching, almost becomes more important than the finished work. Making becomes a ritual with its own rhythm, demanding respect and reverie, a step-by-step process, without rush. To me, the enamels are governed by their own rules, taking on a life of their own. Exploring and mastering these rules has become a lifetime’s endeavour. It is a dance, a collaboration, a dialogue.
enamel workshops
I teach enamelling workshops on a regular basis: Both in-person workshops with me at Atelier NONNE 11 and larger group courses at universities and craft schools. I have taught enamelling at Studio San W in Shanghai, China; Escuela de Arte in Murcia, Spain; Pocosin School of Fine Craft in North Carolina, USA; Coop Gold in Berlin, Germany; and Stellenbosch University in South Africa.
botanicals: my first love
I have always, ever since I was a child growing up on a farm in South Africa, defined my environment in terms of the plants around me. This has never changed, and everywhere I live and travel, I perceive spaces as framed by their botany. Even my inner spaces are expressed as infinitely sprawling verdant ecosystems, sometimes wild and tangled, other times neat and picturesque.
Plants are my language.
I am fascinated by the archetypical dichotomy between the wilderness and the domesticated garden, and how it is embedded in our human psyche, expressed in our folklore, myths and religious customs.
Lately I have become very interested in the ecosystems between the wilderness of the forest and the cultivated land: that liminal space called shrubbery, edge, hedge. The hedge is a threshold, a barrier that, historically speaking, separated a dark and dangerous world (where wild animals, forest spirits and pagan gods roamed and people got lost) from the farmland with its protective dwellings where people ruled, where work was hard but labour was awarded with wheat and beer. The hedge is a magical space, neither here nor there, a space of overlapping worlds and ecosystems, where countless light-loving plants (dog-roses, hawthorn, nettles and sloes, to name a few) weave themselves into a fertile and thorny living wreath. It is a space for collecting our most precious European medicinal herbs, for being in communion with our innermost being, and for reconnecting with our intuition.
Join my community by subscribing to my newsletters
ENglish
My personal Nora Kovats newsletter (written in English) is called ENTANGLED GARDEN and sent out quite irregularly every few months (whenever I have enough thoughts to share and enough time to write). It includes impressions of what strikes me as beautiful and joyful and useful, my own explorations of how to regenerate my creative energy, regulate my nervous system and stay sourced in Nature.
DEUTsch
Our Atelier NONNE 11 Newsletter (written in German) is sent out 4 - 6 times per year with seasonal impressions of the studio and invitations to exhibitions, workshops and other events Alvaro and I are hosting or participating in. It may include any side projects that enliven us, musings on craft and art, news about interesting collaborations, and links to our newest creations in our online shops.
Commissions
Are you dreaming of your own bespoke Nora Kovats jewellery piece or painting? These art works are a marriage of a client’s unique story and my design interpretation and craftsmanship. Sometimes, special materials such as heirloom gemstones or found objects can be integrated. In this way, a rich narrative of personal associations and imagery is woven into an object of true meaning. I would love to hear about your idea!
collaborations:
alchemy of writing project
When artists collaborate to combine their talents, something extraordinary happens: Their individual skills become fused in an object much larger than the sum of its parts. In this project with Atelier NONNE 11 and ELBWOOD, writing instruments are elevated to precious artifacts:
ELBWOOD’s striking minimalist designs and unique styles form the basis of our ALCHEMY OF WRITING project. These artisan pens are either paired with Alvaro’s expressive sand-cast textures, often with cast-in-place precious gemstones, or with my evocative, blended colours in enamelled segments.
Objects gain meaning by being charged with our touch, our intention and our stories. Merging geography and story and craftsmanship in an alchemical process, we are birthing something new. Add another layer: By marrying your unique experience as a client to our craftsmanship and design, we embed your personal narrative of rich associations and imagery into an object of true meaning.
What we offer here in our collaboration is creating an appropriate crucible for this meaning-making process, capturing stories and embedding them, layer by layer, in the precious pieces we make. We are translators of the immaterial into the material, giving tangible expression to that-which-cannot-be-named in your deepest being.
