Meghan Schmiedel
"My jewelry is inspired by the coexistence of life and death within nature, and the fluidity of beauty and decay resulting from it."
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 skulls and beetle wings. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design where, after seeing the preciousness such treasures held mirrored in jewelry as an art form, she received her BFA in jewelry and metalsmithing.
After graduating and spending the better half of a decade in NYC, she 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 the line between life and death. It’s the juxtapositions often present in death—blood shimmering like gems in the sunshine, and peaceful faces at odds with mangled bodies — that not only inspire her but also influence her material choices.
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. Painting with watercolor enamels enables Schmiedel 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 she strives to depict. While her jewelry can be seen as tokens of remembrance for the animals themselves, 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
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 skulls and beetle wings. She attended the Rhode Island School of Design where, after seeing the preciousness such treasures held mirrored in jewelry as an art form, she received her BFA in jewelry and metalsmithing.
After graduating and spending the better half of a decade in NYC, she 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 the line between life and death. It’s the juxtapositions often present in death—blood shimmering like gems in the sunshine, and peaceful faces at odds with mangled bodies — that not only inspire her but also influence her material choices.
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. Painting with watercolor enamels enables Schmiedel 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 she strives to depict. While her jewelry can be seen as tokens of remembrance for the animals themselves, 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
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