Faces That Speak: The Stories Behind Anowa & Esaaba
In many African cultures, the face is not just seen, it speaks.
It carries lineage, memory, labour, spirit, and strength.
Anowa and Esaaba emerge from this understanding. They belong to our Mask Series, a body of work inspired by African traditional masks not as objects of display, but as vessels of meaning. Masks across the continent have always been communicative: they speak to community, to ancestors, to the present moment.
With Anowa and Esaaba, we return to this language shaping brass into faces that carry African features, African symbols, and African ways of knowing.
Anowa: Name, Memory, and Voice
Anowa takes her name from Ama Ata Aidoo’s play Anowa a work that centres a woman who insists on agency, self-definition, and voice in a society that repeatedly asks her to be smaller. In the play, Anowa refuses silence. She questions expectations, challenges tradition when it limits her, and insists on choosing her own path, even when it costs her comfort. Her story is not one of ease, but of conviction. This spirit shapes the earring that bears her name.
Anowa’s eyes are inspired by cowrie shells, once used as currency across Ghana and West Africa. Cowries were more than tools of trade they signified value, feminine power, protection, and wealth carried on the body. By shaping Anowa’s eyes after cowries, we honour a way of seeing rooted in self-worth rather than permission. Anowa looks back at us with a gaze that knows its value.
She does not ask to be understood, she speaks.
Esaaba: Eyes of Endurance, Face of the Warrior
Esaaba means Warrior in the Fante Language.
Her presence is deliberate grounded in strength, protection, and resolve. The shape of Esaaba’s face is inspired by the Zulu shield, an object historically carried not only for defence, but as a symbol of courage, readiness, and identity.
The shield is both protection and proclamation. It stands between vulnerability and survival, between the body and what threatens it. In Esaaba, this form becomes a face strong, upright, and unyielding.
Her eyes are inspired by coffee beans, cultivated across African soil and shaped by labour, patience, and endurance. Coffee carries stories of land and hands, of women and men who work the earth, who persist, who sustain communities far beyond their point of origin.
Small in size yet powerful in impact, the coffee bean becomes an eye that stays alert, watchful, grounded, and forward-looking.
Esaaba carries the spirit of the warrior not as aggression, but as resilience. She honours African strength that does not announce itself loudly, but remains steady, prepared, and enduring.
The Face as Language
Anowa and Esaaba are handcrafted in Ghana, shaped slowly and intentionally in brass. Their features are not decorative choices; they are language.
Through them, we honour African features as archives of knowledge. The face becomes a site of memory. The eyes become symbols. The jewelry becomes a voice.
This work is not about abstraction. It is about recognition.