About
Meghan Schmiedel is a mixed-media jewelry artist with an affinity for New England nature. Growing up in Connecticut, she spent much of her early life drawing, befriending animals, and collecting found “treasures” like tiny skulls and beetle wings. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design where, after seeing the preciousness such treasures held mirrored in jewelry, she received her BFA in jewelry and metalsmithing.
After graduating, she spent the better half of a decade in NYC, navigating a love-mostly hate relationship with the city and the professional arts life she was living there until she, her husband, and their little dog moved to a tiny town in Massachusetts, bookended by woods and cornfields, which hugely shaped her artistic direction and provided her with a well of inspiration from the animals she saw and the ways they navigated life and death. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, and when she’s not working in her studio, you’ll most likely find her reading.
She and her family now live in Western Pennsylvania where she gets to have white-tailed deer as neighbors (and still see some cornfields).
ABOUT THE ART
I once lived in rural New England where I was surrounded by nature, beautiful farms, and an array of animals. In the springtime, the poplar trees bloomed, filling the air with white fluffs that floated and danced their way to the ground where they’d gather to form the most delicate faux snowdrifts. Amidst these ethereal squalls, one may find vultures weeding through entrails, squirrels outrunning hawks, and foxes and the like trying to outrun us. My jewelry is inspired by this coexistence of life and death within nature, and the fluidity of beauty and decay resulting from it.
It’s the strange juxtapositions often present in death—blood shimmering like gems in the sunshine, and peaceful faces at odds with mangled bodies— that not only inspire me but also influence my materials. Beads and pearls transform the physical morbidness of death into something eye-catching and enticing, while also nodding to cemetery immortelles and peoples’ never-ending plight of coping with loss and their own impending death. Watercolor enamels enable me to lend a delicateness to the dark imagery and continue enamel’s history of being used in particularly sentimental pieces of jewelry, making it the perfect medium to honor the often discarded lives of the animals I depict. While my jewelry can be seen as tokens of remembrance, it’s also a reminder for the wearer that in life, there is a balance between all things and that to step into the light, you have to move through the shadows.
