Photograph by Maya Smith
Funlola Coker in her studio.
An occasional purr from the cats in the next room hums along with the Little Dragon album playing in the background of the small studio. Outfitted much like a laboratory, the room has large and small instruments lying about or hanging in dedicated places on the wall.
Funlola Coker hunches over a work table where some two dozen pairs of unfinished earrings are arranged amid rows of tools. Some are white, some are cream. Some are round, some are oblong. Coker is working on one of her winter collections for her jewelry company, Funlola, for which she is the sole artist. She handcrafts earrings, necklaces, rings, and cuffs.
A selection of Funlola Coker’s earrings, hand-crafted from metal and shaded with enamel.
From the Beginning
Coming from a family of artists, Coker has been creating forms of art for as long as she can remember. Her father is a painter and illustrator, her mom is a textile artist, and both of her brothers are illustrators.
“I remember being a kid, probably 3 or 4, and always making time to draw with my brothers,” she says. “Even when I was a teenager, I would practice drawing and painting. I also knew I liked sculpture because I would always work with clay and try to make stuff out of it, but I never actually connected that to what I would be doing.”
Art has always been there, she says. Still, self doubt haunted Coker, making her question if she would ever be able to go to school to study art. Fighting through that doubt, in 2007 she moved from Lagos, Nigeria, to Memphis after being accepted to the Memphis College of Art. “I’m glad I did that because I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” she says.
Coker graduated from MCA in 2011 with a bachelor of fine arts in sculpture. Not interested in gallery representation and looking for a simple way to sell her artwork, she started making and selling jewelry. And so began her business and her journey.
“I stuck to things people could wear, but I never really considered jewelry as an option, I guess,” she says.
Coker had completed a couple of jewelry projects in school, but mainly focused on other art objects. Transitioning wasn’t easy, but she says she already understood the foundation of metalwork and how to create metal objects. She was also aided by YouTube tutorials, workshops, and ultimately, trial and error.
“It’s one thing to want to make jewelry, but it’s another thing to think about the relationship of the jewelry with the body and how they’re going to wear it — the functionality, durability, and all that,” she says. “A lot of it didn’t translate. It took a lot of trial and error. It also took a lot of support from people. People still have the jewelry that I made back then and I see it now and I’m like, ‘Please don’t wear that.’ But they love it and it’s nice to see that.”
At the time, Coker says she didn’t have a metalworking studio so she started working with polymer clay, making jewelry in her Midtown apartment. Her work had a certain appeal to the cats in the next room, Violet and Izzie, just kittens at the time, so she made her closet into a studio.
“I had to do it in there so my cats wouldn’t get to the stuff,” she says. “So yeah, I started in a closet and it grew from there.”
Back then, one might have known her for her food jewelry — earrings like ripe avocados, rings like a tiny sprinkled donut. “It gained a lot of traction, but the point of it was to make enough money to open a jewelry studio,” she says.
After earning enough money to buy the equipment she needed and to secure a studio large enough to support her work, Coker says she quit making food-related jewelry about a year ago and has been focusing on metal jewelry using enamel ever since.
Something From Nothing
When Coker steps into her East Memphis studio for a day of work, she says it can sometimes be hectic, and other times it’s relaxing. But it’s always rewarding.
She likes making jewelry because she likes wearing jewelry, she says, and often she doesn’t see pieces she wants to wear in stores. Her work, she says, is inspired by “a lot of things.”
She pulls forms and shapes from Moroccan architecture and colors and patterns from African textiles. “I’m a science fiction fan so that bleeds into it too,” she says.
Ultimately, she just wants to make something different that’s “not your everyday piece that you’d find in a department store.”
She pulls forms and shapes from Moroccan architecture and colors and patterns from African textiles.
Coker says one of the collections she’s working on now — called Frost — is inspired by cold colors, such as snowy whites and icy blues. The pieces also have hints of gold and orange that are found in a warm fire. She finishes these pieces with a clear enamel, or powdered glass that mimics winter mornings.
Coker is also working on another collection that will combine stonework and enamel. For this one, Coker is “sticking to my roots,” drawing inspiration from West African textiles. She hasn’t decided on a color scheme for this line yet, but she says it will be bold.
From cutting the metals to adding the finishing designs, Coker says the process is gratifying. There’s a “certain sense of wonder,” she says, when she starts a piece and it begins to take form. “It’s incredible to create something that didn’t previously exist and there’s always problem-solving to do, which I love.”
Her favorite part of the process is enameling, she says, as she pours a fine layer of white powdered enamel onto a tiny earring she holds with a pair of tweezers.
“I really like working on engagement rings because you get involved with people who are getting married. You pick a stone with them, pick a metal, and be involved in this thing that’s going to last them the rest of their lives.”
Enameling is “almost like an endless process,” she says, meticulously placing the freshly dusted earrings into a red-hot 1,450-degree kiln. The intense heats melts the powder and transforms it into vibrant colors with a surface like glass.
“You can keep going and keep adding layers using different techniques to change the surface,” Coker says. “It’s like painting on canvas, basically. You can paint forever and end up with something completely different than when you started.”
When a project is finished, there is a certain sense of accomplishment that Coker has grown to appreciate. “I feel pretty good. I can breathe a sigh of relief and take a moment to suck it in because if I don’t do that I end up spiraling into a giant stress ball,” she says. “I actually used to not take a moment to think about it and breathe. I felt like I had to keep going. I’ve learned the value of taking a break.”
Still, she is always eager to move on to the next piece. “It doesn’t last long, so maybe I’m constantly chasing that feeling.”
One of Coker’s favorite items is custom engagement rings and wedding bands.
“I really like working on those because you get involved with people who are getting married,” she says. “You get to pick a stone with them, pick a metal, and be involved in this thing that’s going to last them for the rest of their lives. It’s very special.”
After a week of working on custom orders, doing paperwork, and making sure she’s met her production goals, Coker takes Fridays to wind down. “Playing in the studio” she creates whatever she wants. That can be challenging, as she says she tends to work on things she’s never done before or doesn’t know how to do. But sometimes that benefits production when an experiment goes well and she can add a new piece to her line.
There is much for her to learn, but Coker believes she’s up for the challenge.
“I’ve done it for 10 years now, but there are still so many techniques I want to try,” she says. “I really like problem-solving and figuring out how to build something that ultimately will function well on someone’s body.”
Art on Purpose
Long-term, Coker wants to keep making jewelry, but she also wants to inspire young people, particularly those of color, to get involved in metalwork. “We live in Memphis, a majority black city, so it doesn’t make sense that there aren’t that many black metalsmiths here,” she says.
Coker has been traveling to artist workshops and conferences recently, and “it feels like there are not enough people of color in those spaces.”
Through an apprenticeship or mentoring program, Coker hopes to help young people here who want to be metalsmiths but never thought it was an approachable artform.
She believes it’s important that kids get exposed to different types of art at a young age. “They think, ‘Oh, I can be an artist,’ but they don’t know the different types of artists they can be,” she says. “I always just thought there was painting and drawing, and I was never really good at those things, so it was a bit discouraging.”
This changed for Coker when she took a metalsmith class her first year in college. After that “I was hooked,” she says. If youth could take classes like that at the high school level, “they could see it’s something they can do and that it’s actually obtainable.” Everyone has a different story to tell, Coker says. “It seems important because everyone has a story to tell with their experiences and their different cultures. Everyone is just different because of their demographics and where they live. And if all the art that’s being made is from one type of person, it can get stale and those stories just get forgotten.”
The artist knows firsthand what it’s like for a culture — even one’s own — to be forgotten.
“My formative years were spent in an entirely different culture, and there’s not a huge Nigerian community that I’m aware of in Memphis,” she says. “Every day that I’m here it feels like another memory of home is forgotten.”
Coker says she hasn’t been home to Lagos in a decade and “there’s a lot that happens in your mind when you start feeling less like an immigrant and more like you’re blending into your community.”
Concerned that she’s forgetting her identity and where she comes from, Coker hopes to one day use her art to tell the story of an immigrant’s identity and who they become once they’ve settled in. “It’s still a very fresh idea,” she says.
A large Nigerian flag hangs proudly on the wall in Coker’s studio. It’s a nice reminder of home, she says. “It’s not much, but it’s a little thing that connects me to home every day that I’m in the studio.”
Coker’s work can be purchased online at funlolacoker.com, as well as locally at the Five in One Social Club, the Metal Museum, and The Dixon Gallery and Gardens.
