Sitting in her Nairobi studio for a video interview in late February, Ami Doshi Shah was surrounded by displays of her bold, sculptural jewelry.

There was the eye-catching necklace with a four-inch-wide folded leather collar, lines of oxidized copper and a piece of bark almost 16 inches long from the jacaranda tree in Ms. Doshi Shah’s garden. And there were rings with sharply contrasting shapes, like the chunky square brass ones adorned with large balls of aventurine.

Little wonder that curators from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London borrowed three of her pieces for its exhibition “Africa Fashion,” according to Elisabeth Murray, the project curator. (Opening July 2, the show is to run to April 16, 2023.)

Her work “expands expectations of what jewelry is,” Ms. Murray said, citing as an example Ms. Doshi Shah’s twisted rope necklace made of sisal and salt, mixed with brass. Her jewelry, the curator said, is “not an accessory to an outfit, it’s the main player.”

Danielle Thom, the curator of making at the Museum of London, said she believed that Ms. Doshi Shah’s work combined rawness with sophistication. “She plays with the materials to create a natural effect, but the thought process behind them is a very refined one,” she said.

According to Ms. Doshi Shah, 42, whose first name is pronounced AH-me, she chooses her materials for their easy availability and tactility. (And to avoid Kenya’s expensive import duties, which “can be a value of 25 up to even 100 percent of the value of items themselves,” she said.)

Consider the green zoisite with black veining that she uses in her signature 10-inch-wide curved Torque necklace ($375). The stone, she said, “is cast out like garbage” from the country’s ruby mines, but is “a really beautiful stone.”

She buys most of the materials she uses in Nairobi — often informally. “Sometimes you’ll find someone will come to you with a sack of rough stones and you buy the lot,” she wrote later in a WhatsApp message. One such stone might be the South African tiger’s-eye in the bronze bar earrings with gold chains that she wore during the video interview because, she said, “they are just so comfortable.”

“When I’m in the studio I generally don’t actually wear any jewelry, but I thought I might bling it up for you a little bit,” she said. “Because when you are working, it’s just like a health and safety hazard when you are, like, at the polishing machine or, like, things catch.”

Since starting her business in 2015, she has created four collections with signature pieces, including a vessel pendant with a patinated brass disk (from $75 for a small version with an inch-wide disk and 15-inch chain to $125 for an extra large model with a two-inch disk and 29-inch chain).

The mango wood bangles with aventurine set in brass ($475) are more complex to create than they may look. “Setting metals in wood is probably a bit outside the usual realm of the jeweler’s practice,” said Ms. Thom of the Museum of London. “Because wood and brass are two very different media in which to work. You know, they are materials that respond in very different ways in the hand.”

Ms. Thom said Ms. Doshi Shah was one of the few jewelers “who can take relatively humble material and, through their process and skill, refine them into objects of beauty.”

Louisa Guinness, founder of her contemporary jewelry gallery in London, noted the scale of Ms. Doshi Shah’s creations. “You probably only want to wear one piece at a time because it’s so strong,” she said.

Born in Mombasa, Kenya, Ms. Doshi Shah moved with her family to Oman when she was 3 and then, at 6, to the United States. They returned to Kenya in 1992.

“I knew from quite an early age I wanted to go to art school,” she said. So in 1997 she studied at the University of the West of England, in Bristol, and then received a Bachelor of Arts degree in jewelry and silversmithing from the well-known School of Jewelry at Birmingham City University in 2001. “It’s really focused on the technical aspects of jewelry making, but also with a fairly avant-garde kind of approach,” she said, noting that the training still ripples through her work as “my approach to jewelry is nontraditional, slightly weird.”

She even spent six months in India on a jewelry apprenticeship, dividing her time between a diamond manufacturer in Mumbai and an enameling artisan in Jaipur, “learning the craft and doing some design work as well,” she said. (Her mother and paternal grandfather came from Gujarat, on India’s western coast.)

The experience did not encourage her enthusiasm for the craft, though. So she decided to start working in advertising to support herself “because, basically, my parents had paid for my education,” she said. But by 2014 she “wanted to be creative again,” she said, and began making jewelry, using space at the Kuona Trust Center for Visual Arts in Nairobi, and moving to her current atelier to establish her business a year later. She adopted her own name for it in 2018, and now it is self-sustaining, she said.

Her pieces are either one-offs, sold by appointment at the studio, or — since late 2019 — made in small batches for retailers like Ichyulu in Nairobi and Merchants on Long in Cape Town.

She had two stockists before the pandemic and has added a few more, increasing her revenue to slightly less than $20,000 in 2020; she said she did not know her 2021 revenue yet. But her profit margin has remained the same “because I went from pretty much making everything myself to working with other people to do the production,” she said, referring to Musa Butt, an artisan and his team of three employees, also based in Nairobi.

Tom Burstein, a jewelry dealer and consultant based in Connecticut, said he believed that she could be charging triple for her work.

“A lot of people today, they put some stones together and call themselves a jewelry designer. And that’s not what this is,” Mr. Burstein said. “You see the method, the rationale, the inspiration.”

Customers are looking for expressive jewelry now “as people are much more individual and this jewelry is perfect for that,” he said. “It’s well made, well designed and not something, for now anyway, that somebody is going to have.”

Recently Ms. Doshi Shah decided to adapt her jewelry designs into furniture, — beginning with a $2,000 patinated brass cabinet, which already has been sold. She now plans to work on lighting and housewares, including cutlery, as they are “not related to the body,” she said: “Because it really forces you to think about design and functionality and aesthetics in a very different way.”

And she is working on a 12-piece jewelry collection to unveil in the fall, “if not sooner,” she said, including the tiger’s-eye earrings she wore during her video interview. But Ms. Doshi Shah has more ambitions: to open a new cross-discipline design studio within five years to work with Kenyan designers or perhaps ones from throughout the continent.

Many people treat Africa as if it is one country, she said. But, she added: “There are a lot of interesting ideas and kind of concepts and aesthetics that I think we could take advantage of in terms of cross pollination. There are a lot of interesting things that could come out from working together.”