About the Artist

There she was, poking in and around the London flea markets. Her artistic eye soaking up all the wonderful metal treasures that dotted the streets. As a young girl of 20 while strolling down those cobblestone streets, Mary Mundy had started up an infatuation with antique purses and boxes. Though attending school at Schiller College, she always found time to roam through the famous Portabello Road Flea Market. With every imaginable thing under the sun waiting for the right buyer, it was here that Mary found an old metal purse used by ladies of high fashion during turn-of-the-century England. Delighted with such a find, she snapped up this metal treasure and a collection was born. England had left Mary enchanted and full of ideas.

Back in the states, Mary absorbed all there was in art, sculpture and jewelry making at UT Austin. As her passion for metal work developed, and her mind merging shapes and objects into functional designs, she still yearned to seek the wonders of the world. So after graduating she flew right into work as a flight attendant. Mary’s wonders of the world consisted of flea markets where many unique items simply talked of art and culture. From Canada to India Mary bartered herself into a wide array of old purses and boxes. Today her vintage purses have inspired many of the designs in her current Lunacy collection.

Sydney, Australia caught her heart and she took leave from the carefree blue skies and settled down designing jewelry for the Berta family’s opal business. Their store, Opal Fields, is renowned for their quality of opals and creative designs. But three years was enough and armed with experience, Mary headed for home ground and returned back to the US.

It was 1989 and Texas was ready for some new creations. She setup shop and begun work on metal pieces that incorporated her experiences of jewelry design and her memory of all the wonderful items she beheld in her travels, including purses and boxes of old. Her design and production methods yield pieces that hold the beauty, complexity and inspiration she found in them. Today you can see her magic in each and every design, a certain mystical spell blossoms out of each work of her art. Collectors from all over the world have many of her pieces. Each of her pieces is signed with the company name, Lunacy, and it’s trademark a tiny crescent moon and star.

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