I always had a passion for dolls as a child and, though untidy, I never broke, dismembered or dismantled any of the toys I was given. Even porcelain dolls were safe with me: I actually used to treat them with a sort of reverential respect, knowing that if I had dropped them, they would have smashed into pieces. So I never made up wonderful adventures for them in my mind, deeming them too dangerous for my fragile friends, but I would caress their luscious hair, admire their embroidered clothes and be mesmerised by their pure white limbs. Maybe jewellery designer Megan Marrin was the complete opposite of myself as a child, who knows, maybe she didn't like dolls at all.
My guess comes from the fact that Marrin’s has employed for her M.Graves Jewellery line doll parts rescued from a bombed toy factory in Germany, mounting them on vintage chains or mixing them with semiprecious stones. The result is quirky and funny, but also very surreal and slightly disturbing: a pair of fugitive legs with golden high-heeled shoes hangs from a necklace; decapitated white or coloured porcelain heads are used as gigantic beads and mounted on vintage chains, dismembered arms dangle from bracelets.
Marrin added a bold touch of colour in her current collection, spraying her doll parts in neon shades. The effect she achieved through this process is intriguingly strange as, rather than made of porcelain, the dolls look as if they were made of a strange velvety material.
Apart from being a jewellery designer, Marrin is also an artist. A few months ago she did an exhibition at New York’s travelling gallery Petra Projects of collaged paintings inspired by an ancient Appalachian fable. The technique Marrin used in her collages is similar to the one she employed in her jewellery, but while in her necklaces and bracelets she incorporated vintage elements, for her art pieces she arranged the photographs she found at flea markets in a collage form over abstract paintings. 
Looking at her work as an artist and as a designer, you can spot one recurrent theme, memory. The people in her photographic collages represent someone's memories, in the same way as the broken dolls incorporated in her jewellery pieces are mementos of times disrupted by the tragic events of the war. The memories Marrin scatters around her collages and jewellery have somehow lost their meanings though as they don't belong to anyone anymore. It's indeed the viewer or the wearer who will have to attach new meanings to Marrin's art and designs and give them an order and a pattern, which is something I find rather poetical.
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