"Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade."  - Rudyard Kipling

Märta Mattsson crafts jewelry from contradiction. Born in Stockholm and trained across four continents—from Gothenburg and London to Tokyo and Providence—her work crosses not just geographies, but boundaries of beauty and discomfort, nature and artifice, decay and preservation.⁠
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Inspired by 18th-century cabinets of curiosities and the natural history museums she adored as a child, Mattsson collects remnants of the once-living—dead cicadas, beetle wings, insect husks, and preserves them in resin. Far from morbid, her pieces are reverent. She enhances their fragile bodies with finely ground stones, shimmering pigments, and painterly precision, transforming specimens into treasures.⁠

There is seduction in her work, but also resistance. She doesn’t disguise decay; she makes us look at it more closely. Why do we revere the gemstone but recoil at the insect? What happens when a corpse shimmers like a gem?⁠

Mattsson’s jewelry asks us to reconsider our relationship to beauty and mortality. Her work suggests that transformation can come not just from bloom, but from breakdown. That which once crawled or flew or shimmered can still astonish long after it stops moving.⁠