Dallas Artist Morgan Thaxton Crafts Good Bone Structures for Halloween and Beyond

Whether you decorate with average-sized skellies or have snagged the coveted 12-foot Home Depot version, bone-based décor is an undeniable icon of Halloween. In Morgan Thaxton’s hands, the traditional plastic skeleton is elevated to a work of art.

The Dallas-based artist takes skeletons you can find at any Halloween store and transforms them with various materials (including shells, silk flowers, yarn, mirrored tiles, pearls and car paint) to make fantastical figures that recall everything from works of art to fashion collections from the likes of Alexander McQueen or Schiaparelli.

“It was one of those artist things,” Thaxton says of her first skeleton, which she made just last year. “I have a thing for Jack the Pumpkin King [from The Nightmare Before Christmas]. I woke up one day incredibly inspired and set off to do it. I’d been thinking about this for years, but I just decided to make one and see what happens. I’m a self-funded artist, so I got my money together, made one, put it on Instagram and said, “Let’s see if it sells.'”

To her surprise, it did, starting a cottage industry of skeleton crafts she executes in addition to her other seasonal duties, such as creating floral and Christmas décor for private and corporate clients.

Thaxton comes by her passion for creativity organically – raised in Corpus Christi, she learned from her crafty mom at an early age how to liven up a holiday.

“Growing up, my mom wasn’t too big on Christmas, but there’s something about Halloween that’s fantasy and pure fun,” she says. “Mom always played with dark and light really well. Her Halloween was very fantasy-inspired: It could be cute, or it could be spooky. It was always over the top and very extravagant. Halloween was everything that was wholesome about a holiday to me. It’s not about gifts; it’s just about imagination. Everyone is happy on Halloween.”

After attending art school at Southern Methodist University, Thaxton brought the artistic passion she was raised with to her first big job working with the luxury boutique Grange Hall. Initially helping with jewelry orders, she worked her way up to store manager by the mid-2000s, traveling to Paris with co-owner Rajan Patel to see the designer collections.

“I became the girl under the stairs,” Thaxton says, laughing about her do-everything role. “They took me on to do jewelry, and we’d find really avant-garde designers with whom we had exclusivity. They always had a macabre flavor – memento mori-type stuff was our vibe. Because my mother was the queen of Halloween, walking into Grange Hall was like walking into my brain.”

After working for the shop for just under a decade, she moved to New York, where she landed a gig at a high-end baby store called Giggle. She married a Brit, precipitating a move to Bath, England, for a couple of years. Upon Thaxton’s return to Texas, she found herself the single mom of a 2-year-old with no desire to go back into the grind of retail.

“I was doing interiors and creative projects, like floral design and decorating people’s houses for Christmas,” she says.

Trained as a printmaker, the artist nonetheless found herself adept at three-dimensional work, and a love for sculpture prompted her to try her first floral and butterfly-themed skeleton design on for size.

Every Day Is Halloween

“I love working with my hands,” she says. “For Christmas, I do trees, so I was thinking, ‘What would be my big thing for Halloween?’ If someone had one item that screamed fantasy Halloween, what would it be? I just love the human form, I’m fascinated with anatomy, so I thought, ‘A skeleton!’ I want to make them a showpiece. If someone has just one item that screamed fantasy Halloween, that would be it.”

With the human form as a foundation, Thaxton drills, wires, hot glues, crochets and sculpts to get the result she wants. Anything can be a jumping-off point for her, and she delights in crafting special orders to reflect a client’s aesthetic, such as a skelly she painted to recall the starry skies of a West Texas ranch.

“I use a lot of references from history, fashion or art,” she says. “I did a Missoni [knitwear] type as if Missoni did a skeleton. I have one in a wine color that’s very baroque, like a plush Renaissance painting.”

Her skeletons are sold by special order and retail from $650 to $2,000. The price might seem steep for an object based on a plastic form, yet each one takes hours upon hours of intricate crafting, and her mostly Highland Park clientele are more than happy to pay the price.

“Stuff like the mirroring of each bone is very labor intensive,” Thaxton says. “Disco balls are expensive. For the mermaid one, I collected all of these shells for years. I scour different stores for textures or materials. I’m going to die in a Michael’s or a Hobby Lobby!”

So far, she has had the luck to sell mostly from her Instagram, with local interior designers placing occasional orders for clients. As Thaxton envisions her works being displayed year-round, she hopes to gain gallery representation (some spaces in New Orleans are interested, she says) and up her game by having her skeletons fabricated in light steel or aluminum.

Until that day, she will continue to let her imagination run wild as she transforms the human form into covetable sculptures- very good bone structure, indeed.

“[The skeleton] gave me the ability to go nuts, whether it’s beading, knitting or florals,” Thaxton says. “No two will ever be the same. I try to really go out of the box and test myself or challenge myself. I approach it from an artist’s standpoint and try to take the kitsch out of it and elevate it to a more artistic level. It’s not just your regular spooky decoration.”