A Beautiful Bark
With her jewelry, Molly Taylor shines a light on nature's raw designs
A visitor’s first steps into Molly Taylor’s home are swaddled in blue velvet and song. Here in the dark, cozy space of her fiancé Denton Hatcher’s studio has many a local songwriter (Thomas Johnson, Dalton Wayne, Ben Bell, Clay Parker and Jodi James, to name a few) sat to record their sound. Just beyond the heavy curtain of Blue Velvet Studios, though, one passes into the bright, warm, sycamore-scented air of Taylor’s Beneath the Bark jewelry workshop. In these creative, collaborative realms, the two are building their lives together.
“Our life is half making music, half making jewelry,” said Taylor, owner and designer of Beneath the Bark Jewelry. “My dreams have totally come true.”
Hatcher and Taylor had both been on the Baton Rouge singer/songwriter circuit for years before they started playing together, soon after they began dating. “I had opened up for her a few times,” said Hatcher. “Her writing is so great, and she has a fantastic voice. It was a great way to get to know her.” Hers is a powerful voice, impressively acoustic and carefully weighted with the rootsy tones of experience—and makes a stirring harmony with Hatcher’s eclectic take on an old-country twang. “She can make any grown man cry,” he said of her sound. “It’s happened on several occasions. People will come tell us how much they were moved by her, and it’s always some old guy.”
Today, the two spend most weekends touring the region as a duet, with performances from Mississippi and Alabama to Tennessee and beyond––in addition to regular stage appearances at venues across Louisiana.
After their engagement last year, Molly moved into Hatcher’s home, bringing her jewelry business from her former Mid City space with her and setting up shop in the back of the recording studio.
“This is my favorite shop I’ve ever had,” said Taylor, practically spinning next to her band saw.
The broad aesthetic of Taylor’s jewelry is simple: it is all made from wood, the starting point of so much human innovation and creativity, the bare bones for beauty and functionality in our homes and often the most stunning element of nature’s raw designs. Taylor said that when it comes to designing each piece, the wood speaks for itself. “It’s all about the grain. I can always tell exactly what it is going to be just by looking at it.”
Against a landscape as distinctive and culturally ingrained as Louisiana’s, Taylor’s ability to spotlight the mesmerizing details of regional trees with stunning, minimalist design elevates her work beyond statement jewelry. A chunky cuff is adorned in the tight waving stripes of a Louisiana sinker cypress pulled from the bottom of Lake Maurepas. A set of hoops appears carved from marble but is in fact spalted, the remarkable result of fungi infecting a pecan tree and leaving behind admittedly gorgeous discolorations. Cherry rings were formed from the remnants of a fallen tree in Baton Rouge’s Mid City.
“These trees, many of them have been here so much longer than we have,” she said. “They’ve seen things.”
Taylor sources much of her material from local woodworkers Will Thomas, Mitch Evans, and Jay Cudd, who know to call her if they’ve got anything good. “I also get lots of scraps from random people who think of Beneath the Bark when they’ve got some interesting wood laying around.” Most of it, she said, pointing to a pile sitting neatly in the corner of her shop, has stayed with her for years. She tries to use every little scrap she can, things that get discarded by anyone else.
“In today’s throwaway culture, making something out of essentially nothing is such a beautiful thing,” said Hatcher, who now works full time with Beneath the Bark. “You don’t have to source anything, don’t have to cut down this tree—it’s something that’s already there. There’s greater beauty in it than fashioning whatever else out of gold. And it’s something you are putting forth that can possibly be worn for another hundred years.”
Right now though, Taylor’s oldest pieces are only five years young, and they hang in a special spot in her shop. “It’s fun to look at these, to see how far I’ve come,” she said. When she made them, she said, it was not out of any remarkable creative epiphany or grandiose entrepreneurial eco-friendly plans: “It was Christmas, and I needed gifts for everyone, and I was broke.”
Having always been design-minded, she went digging for the cheapest materials she could find—scraps of wood in her former partner’s woodshop. She shared photos of the results online and was almost immediately contacted by the downtown boutique Aristocracy Apparel (now closed), with a request to sell her products in store. An influx of commissions and interest followed. Five years later, Beneath the Bark is now available in stores across Louisiana, in Texas, and in Florida, and you can often find Taylor at pop ups and markets, like Mid City Makers Market, all across the region.
If you’re from Baton Rouge though, and you frequent the Mid City hotspot Radio Bar, you know that until very recently, Taylor—with her bright smile, tendency toward hi-so-nice-to-meet-you hugs, and vibrant tattoo sleeves—was a long-time behind-the-bar mainstay. “Quitting that job in January was the biggest leap,” she said. “I got to the point where I had to pick: am I going to be a bartender, or am I going to be a musician and a jewelry maker? Because you can’t do all three.”
“I got to the point where I had to pick: am I going to be a bartender, or am I going to be a musician and a jewelry maker? Because you can’t do all three.”
The decision was finalized by an unexpected, life-changing email. “It’s so crazy because that day, I was just having a moment with my mom, on the phone crying, just doubting it all,” she said. “Then I hung up, and my phone was like ding ding.”
A London-based organization dedicated to showcasing up and coming independent designers had reached out—after finding her work online through her previous participation as a vendor at Krystal Frames show in New Orleans Fashion Week in 2016—and invited her to take part in their Spring/Summer 2020 show for this fall’s New York Fashion Week.
“I’ve always wanted to go, even when I was little,” she said. “I have dreamed about this forever, but could have never imagined I’d be going as a designer. I’m sweating just thinking about it.”
Since then, Taylor’s been working with Baton Rouge seamstress Holly Maynard to develop six looks, all designed by Taylor, for her Fashion Week showcase at Pier 59 Studios this September, featuring all new jewelry pieces. “Crazy big bangles stacked up on all their arms,” she envisions. “The aesthetic is going to be very true to myself, very seventies, laid back, groovy, funky, sexy. All those words.”
“She’s always coming up with new designs,” said Hatcher. “Doing it constantly, sitting in the car, jotting down ideas. Watching that artistic spark is a beautiful thing.”
[Read this: Unique wedding bands, each with a story to tell.]
As the date gets closer, Taylor describes it like getting married (which, she notes, she and Hatcher will also be doing in November). “You plan for something like this your entire life, and in a moment—just three days—it’s going to be over. But … let’s see what happens after!"
She laughed. “Who knows, maybe I’ll end up ball and chained to the fashion industry forever. But oh, I’d love that! I want Beneath the Bark to be everywhere.”
When we visited Taylor in July, the fuzzy air of her workshop seemed to radiate with the energy of preparation and possibility—balancing between the intimacy of her creative haven of a home and all the ways it would soon grow.
She had recently cleaned out her shop, but the wood dust was impossible to totally eliminate. It clung to the fading photographs on the pinboard, her “The Future is Now” poster, the taxidermied deer above the window, and the piles and boxes of wood bits found in almost every nook and cranny. She joked about the heat, resting heavy in the room, how she’d know she really made it when she got a studio with an air conditioner.
Hatcher himself was somewhere nearby, under the Blue Velvet, working on recent recordings. The two were gearing up to release Molly’s upcoming self-titled EP, not to mention making preparations as their November wedding date approaches. And all in between the work of product development and production for New York Fashion Week, which was less than two months away.
Taylor was short on inventory, keeping most of her pieces for Fashion Week under wraps and having brought the rest to Wanderlust by Abby the day before. The stragglers she was able to share ended up being some of her favorites, many which came straight from her ears and her wrists.
Her most recent project sits in a box on her desk: dozens of hand-crafted wooden tap handles, commissioned for Radio Bar’s much-anticipated Government Street sister, Mid City Beer Garden, which is set to open later this summer. It’s a project that poetically binds Taylor’s worlds, past and present—a statement to a community bent on supporting its makers, a community in which Taylor has been embedded for a decade. And as she steps wholeheartedly into a world built entirely of music and art, she leaves a little something of herself behind the bar, too.
Visit mollytaylormusic.com to hear her new EP, due out on August 18, with a release party at Baton Rouge Gallery. Taylor will perform at 4 pm.