From the road, the house looks ordinary enough. The small log cabin nestles into a woodsy hillside in a rural neighborhood in Edgartown. It belongs to Margot Datz, who has been making art on Martha’s Vineyard for thirty years. People still talk about her first show where she introduced us to her collection of lifelike soft-sculpture figures. Margot’s scallop shucker, who looks like a wizened snaggletoothed gnome, still presides over a table full of birds’ nests in her house. One of her latest projects is a book of her own bubble-bath wisdom, A Survival Guide for Landlocked Mermaids (Atria Books/Beyond Words Publishing, April 2008), illustrated with her paintings of unexpected sights, like a mermaid clasping a snowman in her arms.

My friend, Island painter Rose Abrahamson, has the idea that some people make their home like a nest – a unique habitat where you can’t imagine anyone else living. We decided to investigate Island nests with the idea of making a book, and we both thought of Margot. I had seen her work over the years, but Rose knew her from the art world and had visited her house. Rose is a keen observer with an active imagination and dry wit, and she told me, “Margot is part shaman and part showman, and a showman needs an audience. Her house is like a theater with all her worldly goods on display. It’s like a stage set, maybe for a play about the flamboyant private lives of the Victorians. Entering her house is like going into an enchanted kingdom where the high priestess Margot reigns supreme.”

To visit Margot, we climb wide granite steps leading from the driveway up to her front porch, which is filled with exotic, oversized pieces of furniture that look ready for a leisurely gathering of Amazonian mermaids and Herculean mermen. Realistically painted morning-glory vines climb both sides of the front door, above which a mosaic of mussel-shell flowers surrounds a sea of purple wampum pieces where a mermaid swims among fish.

Margot greets us at the door. With waves of hair like an energy field surrounding her animated face, and a slim, lively figure, Margot looks a lot like a mermaid herself – minus the tail. We step into a small entry room that’s open to the kitchen and living room, and see the kind of lair a land-bound mermaid might live in after years of sorting through the flotsam on life’s shores. The rooms are filled with the whimsies Margot has created or transformed or acquired – like the African ceremonial headdress perched incongruously on top of a hutch. A tribal council of beaded figures stands soberly on the high plateau of this unexpected top hat.

The small entry room, filled with collections of Margot’s particular oddities, is arranged for theatrical effect. Rose says, “Her first act is very dramatic.” We want to look everywhere at once but direct our attention, somewhat randomly, to the exquisite, timeworn figure of a small woman in a long dress; she stands delicately poised, with arms outstretched, on top of a little table. She began her life as a fine German lamp, but by the time she came under Margot’s protection, she was bald. Margot glued on a bit of dog’s hair and tied a ribbon around her head. She sits on a spring base and, giving her arms a little push, Margot makes the whole figure quiver, saying, “I call it Our Lady of Stress.”

After the entry room, we go no further into the house than the kitchen counter where we sit, overwhelmed, while Margot serves us tea and we talk. It’s clear to Rose and me that our idea of nests has found a home at Margot’s house – and in her psyche. Margot says, “Nesters take the fragments, junk, and raw materials and recompose them into art. It doesn’t start out that way, but it becomes that from what they do with it.” Rose adds, “Out of the ruins, they build something.”

Margot tells us about her mother, who saved all her broken Limoges teacups and saucers on a top shelf in a kitchen cupboard, hoping a glue would be invented that could mend them someday. Margot found the broken china long after she grew up, when she helped her mother move.

She glued the pieces together and, inside the cups, made little dioramas for all of her family members.

The cup she made for herself has a child’s plastic polar bear figurine standing in front of a painted winter scene. Around the rim of the saucer is a mantra Margot wrote: “Optimism is the ability to gather up the pieces of our grand expectations and rejoin them to form something completely new.”

The eldest of four children born in six years, Margot had an unconventional upbringing. Until she was about eight years old, her family owned and lived in a hotel in upstate New York. Margot says, “It was a friendly version of The Shining; it had a surreal feeling about it. We had a pet duck, whose legs had been bitten off, that we carried around in a basket.”

Life wasn’t easy for the family, but their difficulties helped shape the resourceful, multi-talented person that Margot is. As a result of her interests and the jobs she’s consigned to do from year to year, her artwork often takes on a different focus. As she says, “I am unfettered by one particular identity.”

She stopped making her soft sculptures and began to teach herself to paint when she had babies of her own: her daughter, Scarlett, who is now twenty-seven and very creative in her own right; and her son, Wolfie, who is twenty-one and studying ceramics at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire. That was the beginning of Margot’s next phase, as a fine artist and gallery owner – in the mid-eighties at the Chilmark Gallery (now a real estate office across from the Chilmark Store); and in the mid-nineties at The Boathouse Gallery, which was on Edgartown harbor.

She has illustrated four children’s books for singer Carly Simon; created an eighty-nine-foot mural for the children’s hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, that includes a sculpted bas-relief foreground; and in 2007, she painted a dramatic mural depicting the flood waters of Hurricane Katrina on the walls of a New Orleans center for homeless and displaced people. For the children’s section of the Oak Bluffs library, she made the seventeen stack ends that illustrate the history of the written word.

Her vibrant personality makes Margot seem larger than life, and her productivity as an artist gives one the impression that she must be in several places at once to accomplish all she does. She has a motto above her front door that says: “Be Here Now Here Be.”

Maybe it reminds her that she is at home and can settle into one place. Margot has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, which she says is not really a disorder but rather a gene type. Speaking generally, she says, “We came from different hill tribes – some have a lot of energy. I find it hard to edit. It’s hard to stop until something is totally encrusted. Then I think I have to edit. I am the horse and I am the rider.”

For Margot, her house is a kind of external view of the inside of her brain. It’s filled with memories and the things that excite her. As she says, “It contains the beautiful shifting collections of what fascinates me.” Looking around at the bounty of feeling expressed in the house, Rose says to Margot, testing the waters, “There is such a feeling of romance here, of faded rose petals, as if you’re holding onto the essence of romance.”

“I think I am a romantic,” Margot says.

Rose wades into the shallows. “This could also have been an opium parlor,” she says, referring to the living room, which we can see from our stools at the kitchen counter, with its velour couches and decorative furniture, art, and the baroque statue of the goat-footed god Pan.

“There is a little feeling of decadence,” Margot agrees.

Rose dives in. “It’s a bit like a bordello. It could be a place for assignations.”

Before we get in over our heads, we’re interrupted and Margot greets her high-school-age apprentice, who has just arrived to help in her basement workshop. Rose and I go to wander around the living room, where there is a sensuous feeling to the colors – bright orange, moss green, gold, persimmon – and a feeling of old-world elegance. The logs of the walls and cathedral ceiling create a sort of picture frame for all the visual sights. The sea of velour-covered furniture has been mellowed by time the way that water smooths the sharp edges of sea glass; it softens the solid look of the wood. A couple of the pillowed couches from another era have their backs together, creating a standing wave of comfort. Sunlight filters through the orange silk curtains, reflecting off the crystals and chandelier prisms that dangle from the edge of a lamp shade.

The life-size cement statue of Pan stands demurely holding his pipes, a colorful necklace of plastic fruits around his neck and a potted plant on the platform over his head. On the wall nearby, there’s a cluster of metal sconces that look like squid with glowing marble eyes made by Chilmark artist Scott McDowell. Across the entire length of the wall above the fireplace is a three-dimensional tableau created by Margot many years ago as a metaphoric self-portrait. It contains three figures: a fortuneteller with her deck of cards dealing out destiny, a Chaucerian nun with a red habit to proclaim that love
conquers all, and a young child of the fields and forest, who captures the magic of the natural world.

Rose remarks on the fairy-tale atmosphere of the room, while one of Margot’s dogs hops up onto the carved wooden love seat and examines us aloofly from his spot between some silky green pillows, looking very much like the prince of this magical realm.

At a corner of the room where the logs of the walls crisscross, there is an array of objects that seems like a folk-art exhibit assembled by the tiny people from the children’s book The Borrowers – an unrelated assortment of bottle caps, fish lures, candles, dolls, and clay figures made by Margot’s
children.

On the other side of the house, Margot’s dining room is a realm of splendor and intrigue, a little world of its own in this house that already seems like a world apart. A glittering, cut-glass chandelier cascades downward like the fronds of a palm tree above the dining table, where flowered fine china and polished silverware look as if an elegant dinner party is about to take place. Margot decided to leave the table set when a party was canceled on short notice. With such a resplendent setting, the addition of dinner guests almost seems superfluous. Above the windows are wooden valances, made by Margot, covered with a collage of mirror fragments and seashell flowers. Antique pressed-tin molding – a find from the Edgartown thrift store – delineates the edges of the ceiling. About the room’s decor, she says, “I call it neo-Victorian.”

The little bathroom beyond the dining room is Margot’s gallery of “funky art” by various artists. Every wall is covered with elaborately framed paintings and prints, from risqué ladies to sedate lithographs of fruit. On shelves and cupboard tops are collections of birds’ nests, masks, shells, and odd little china animals and figurines. Tucked in behind the wall lamp is a young couple – a Barbie doll with a mermaid fishtail and a plastic action figure wearing lace. Rose says, “That’s the first gentleman I’ve seen here. G.I. Joe has discovered his feminine side.”

This nest of Margot’s has been a long time in the making. She and her former husband Charlie Blair built the house from a kit in 1979 and then, according to Margot, “lived for years and years with fish-trap furniture, luan doors, and plywood floors.” Over time, the furniture was upgraded and the floors covered by hand-hewn planks. Margot says when Charlie lived with her, the house was what she’d call “Bavaria, by the sea” because, she says, “I was interested in hand-painted, folky, decorative painting, furniture, and fabrics. I found there was an aesthetic thread that connected ethnicities in folk art, and at the time I was quite intrigued with the newly opened doors to Middle Europe.”

As the children grew older and Margot was on her own, she felt freer to express certain visual sensualities, and the house became more about “the woman.” As was popular during the Victorian era, she has gathered wonders from exotic lands. Now she describes her house as “Balinese, New England.”

There is a side to Margot’s house that reflects the difficulties of her childhood and the earlier struggles in her life. In the stairwell, Margot has painted patches of wall to look like old bricks behind peeling plaster. Rose says to me the day after our visit, “You see what’s beyond the wall and it’s threadbare – such a contrast to the rest of the house. I think Margot is very successful now but hasn’t always been. She could never buy anything new for so long, and a lot of things in the house you know originated as junk.”

In Margot’s house, broken things are not turned out, because in them she sees other possibilities. It’s as if by beautifying them, she makes them whole again. Ruby and sapphire blue wine glasses that have lost their stems become part of a spiral wire sculpture, along with hand-blown glass globes and candles that hang in the kitchen window. It was meant to be a candelabrum, but as Margot says, “It’s become a celebration of a lot of broken stuff.” Margot has done the optimum someone can do to convert a house into a realm of her own expression.

In speaking of the essential nature of her house, Margot says, “Sometimes things are magnetized. They make sense together. In my house, it’s the gestalt of the place. It’s a bunch of things I’ve found that I wove together like a visual tangle. It’s all woven together into a nest.”