Fish Cuff Bracelet

A cuff built as a creature rather than a canvas: the bracelet resolves into a single sinuous fish, its body coiling in high repousse around the wrist, scaled and finned along the dorsal ridge, head and tail facing each other across the open gap. Small amethyst cabochons — set at the creature's eye and at a counterpoint on the lower terminal — are the only color in what is otherwise a study in darkened silver relief. Morrill records that Margot de Taxco drew on Pre-Columbian motifs as well as the dramatically modeled, curling forms of the baroque facade of Taxco's Sta. Prisca; this bracelet folds both sources into a single object (Morrill, p. 168).

The repousse work carries the piece. The embutador — the ball-ended cylindrical tool used by Taxco silversmiths to raise silver from the reverse — builds a creature that exists in full volume, not surface pattern alone (Morrill, p. 15). Chasing then articulates individual scales and the foliate scrollwork fanning outward at the terminals, while beaded wire traces the principal contours as a framing element recurrent in Margot's production. Controlled oxidation darkens the recesses and sharpens the raised planes — the pavonado approach that Stromberg notes was in wide use in Taxco workshops of the 1940s, particularly those with which Margot van Voorhies Carr was associated at that time (Stromberg, p. 31).

Margot ran her taller under one of the Taxco school's more systematically applied inventory disciplines: design numbers were stamped on pieces to track models in production, with lower numbers generally indicating earlier work (Morrill, p. 15). For a maker whose output ranged from enamel-on-silver series to fully sculptural silver objects, this cuff belongs to the latter register — form as the argument, material as its proof.