By Sara Anne Donnelly
Photographed by Michael D. Wilson
“We have a little bubble here and we’ve worked pretty hard to maintain it,” jewelry designer Coco Corral says from the barn turned studio she shares with her painter husband, Gil. The barn is attached to an 1880 farmhouse they’ve lived in since 2005, when they moved with their daughter to Biddeford from Portland, Oregon, to be closer to family. Outside, there’s a busy crossroads, with fast-food restaurants and a mini mall. Inside, large windows face a tree-lined yard, vintage sofas perch atop a mosaic of threadbare Oriental rugs, and a pellet stove’s woodsy warmth syncs with the aroma of the building’s century-old pine.
“It feels in the studio like you’re not in time and place,” says Corral, who went by Jennifer until age 25, when she realized how many Jennifers are in the world. “I can walk in here and really focus and enter my head-heart-soul space.”
That space hosts Corral’s rather brutal creative process. Next to a shin-high antique Japanese table (where Gil sometimes leads Zoom-guided meditations), a cluttered L-shaped desk is the home base of Loving Anvil, Corral’s jewelry business. Most days, you can find her here, knit cap pressing down her long blonde hair, assaulting gemstones and reclaimed brass, sterling silver, and 14-karat gold to create tiny testaments to a world that, as she sees it, is best confronted with a hammer and torch. “I enjoy the struggle with the metal and stones, and I let it kind of lead me through the process,” she says. “I like the insanity of restricting myself and working small. That becomes the challenge.”
Jewelry isn’t Corral’s only medium (she recently received a grant from the Maine Arts Commission to expand an ongoing project of marionettes in wooden boxes), but it’s where her reverence for “the organic handprint of mother and human nature” is best displayed. Corral’s jewelry wrestles the wild into the barest submission, winking at the pretense of civility. Chunks of amethyst, crystal, fossilized wood, quartz, and turquoise jut out from their settings (rough-cut stones, she says, have “less human bossiness about them”). Hammer-dinged necklaces, bracelets, and rings are handstamped with quotes from anti-establishment icons like Jack Kerouac (“The only people for me are the mad ones . . .”). Dainty hoop earrings announce in tiny block letters that only an intimate could read, “F**k this” and “F**k that” (there are letters, however, in place of the stars). The earrings were 2020’s runaway bestseller. “Pretty much anything with f**k on it sold really well last year,” Corral says.
TELL US MORE COCO CORRAL
You spend hours stamping long passages into your jewelry. Why so many words?
I love language and pattern, and handstamping each letter is like a meditation. I did a bracelet that I still have because there’s hours and hours put into it, stamping Blondie’s song “Rapture.” Goddamn, that’s a wordy song. When I printed it out, I was like, yeah! But five panels in I thought, wow, this was particularly stupid.
Where did the name Loving Anvil come from?
I love anvils. You hit them and they don’t give. There’s something so satisfying about that. My anvil is small, but one day I’m going to get a big old anvil.
How about your name change?
It was kind of spur-of-the-moment. I was working in admissions at an art school in Portland, Oregon, and there were, I think, four other Jennifers just in my office. So they were like, can you give us a nickname? I said, um, I’ll go by Coco! Because Gil would call me that sometimes.
How did your marionette project come about?
When I was an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design, I stumbled upon an article about artists behind the Iron Curtain who were making large-scale marionettes in boxes. It just stuck with me, the idea of making these marionettes restricted in these tiny worlds. It was melancholy, impending. The human condition, pretty much.
Jeez. So they can’t be removed from their boxes?
Oh no. Unless they were to cut their cord. And if they did that, wow. That would be alarming.
Visit lovinganvil.com to see more of Coco Corral’s work.
