Marcelina
Marcelina Nicz trained as an interior architect and has worked with titanium for more than a decade. Every INKRU piece is designed, shaped, anodised and finished by her, in one small studio.
Her work reaches beyond jewellery, into painting, analogue photography and glass, and all of it feeds back into how she uses colour and texture in metal.
She is rarely alone in the studio. Kusy, her cat, supervises most of the work.
Where it began
INKRU started in Poland in 2015, with furniture rather than jewellery. Marcelina set titanium into wood: tables and interior objects with the metal inlaid into natural materials.
The name comes from that craft. Inkrustacja is the Polish word for inlay, the art of setting one material into another.
From furniture to jewellery
Over time the pieces got smaller. The fascination with titanium stayed, but the scale changed, from a table top to something you can wear every day.
Each piece is cut out, by hand or by laser depending on the design, then textured and anodised by hand: an electric current grows a thin oxide layer on the metal, and that layer turns light into colour. No paint and no coating. The whole story is on our titanium care & colour page.
Tenerife
Today the studio is on Tenerife. Each collection starts from a place in the Canary Islands: a rock pool, an old garden in La Orotava, a window by César Manrique on Lanzarote.
Life on the island is slower, and so is the work: small batches, made one piece at a time, a creative journey that began in Poland more than a decade ago.
Beyond jewellery
Jewellery is one part of Marcelina’s work. She also paints and shoots analogue photography, and the canvases below are hers. That practice shapes how she approaches colour, texture and composition in metal.
From titanium, colour and light.
Curious how the colour is made? Read Titanium care & colour.