Märta Mattsson’s jewellery explores decay and rebirth and the tension between attraction and repulsion. We all, she believes, have a powerful urge to engage in fantasies as a means to escape everyday life. And it is these fantasies which she translates into ornament and invites us to marvel over their strange familiarity. Beetles set in candy-coloured resin and decorated with seashells, cicadas glittering with crushed semi-precious stones like creatures that once graced the shelves of an 18^th century Wunderkammer, metamorphose into astonishing objects of adornment. 

Born in Stockholm in 1982, Märta trained at the Nääs factories in Sweden before studying at HDK – Academy of Design and Craft at Gothenburg University, where she now teaches, and then at the Royal College of Art in London. She was named Young Applied Artist 2016 by the Bengt Julins Fund. Her work is exhibited widely and held in several collections, including the Marzee Collection, the Röhsska Museum in Gothenburg, the RCA Collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim in Germany and the Museum of Art and Design in New York.