Nora Kovats is a contemporary jewellery designer, illustrator, writer and botanical enthusiast from South Africa.

Through her creative practice, Nora has begun to open a window into an imaginary world where botanical, animal and fungal shapes merge to construct a unique visual language. As an ‘identity-hopper’, both South-African and European, she is interested in the way stories, layered over each other countless times, give meaning to our lives. Nora’s work speaks of an enchanted inner space, of dissolving boundaries between 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.

Above all, she has devoted herself to enamelling as a jewellery making technique, both due to its vibrancy and the element of chance and uniqueness dictated by the firing process.

Nora studied contemporary jewellery design at Stellenbosch University near Cape Town. After graduating with her Masters in Visual Arts, Nora set up her own studio.

In 2016 she moved her atelier to Berlin, where she lived for four years, exhibiting both in Germany and internationally on a regular basis. Nora relocated to the picturesque town of Bamberg in 2021, where she and her husband Alvaro-Luca Ellwart opened their joint studio-gallery NONNE 11.

The couple’s year is divided into seasons of intense making, teaching and exhibiting at fairs, craft exhibitions and galleries. Nora has taught enamelling at Studio San W in Shanghai, China; Escuela de Arte in Murcia, Spain; and Pocosin School of Fine Craft in North Carolina, USA.

Nora acts as an ambassador for the hand-crafted. She sincerely believes that a path towards a positive future for humankind leads through strengthening and inspiring the act of imagining and making in herself and others.