In the Scullery

A necklace with a string of ceramic children’s heads makes for delicate voodoo in the jewelry of New York-based artist and designer Megan Marrin. In Marrin’s hands, porcelain doll heads, vintage beads, and dead-stock pieces of metal and chains are components of a dark vision of handmade, one-of-a-kind trinkets and necklaces. Teardrop earrings look like rusted cages, and metal links connect geometric shapes among clusters of body parts colored like plaster of Paris. Aptly named M. Graves, the line evokes a sense of buried past, and its designer excavates charms from her 19th Century Bisque dolls from such exotic, run-down locales as factories bombed during WWII. But there’s at least one step in between the designer and death. “I order the doll parts from a couple people in Germany,” Marrin explains, “where they actually dig them up from the ground.” For her current collection, Marrin featured mettalic triangles, glass beads, and signature disembodied dolls. “I found them in a on a vintage hunt in Providence, Rhode Island, and they seemed really strong, and very modern in contrast to the older components,” she says. Marrin opened her line in 2007 as “a side project, as another way to make art,” and this fall marks the SVA graduate’s fifth collection. She approaches her creations as conceptual works, taking beautiful objects and literally making them a sort of wearable sculpture, with a postmodern eye for Classical figure studies. After all, it’s the Greeks and Romans who taught us to antique, isn’t it?

Available at Opening Ceremony or at M. Graves.