The Strings of Fantasy

Sometimes when people watch me doing my beadwork and they realize how much time, patience and detail it takes to finish a piece, I can read the question in their eyes, "Why are you doing this?"  The simple answer is that I profoundly enjoy it.

The world of beads and beaded jewelry opened up to me several years ago when I discovered that beads were ideal items for collection.  Being small, attractive, and easy to wear, these miniature forms of cultural expression, religious beliefs and aesthetic values crossed my path everywhere throughout my frequent travels.  With the gradual expansion of my bead collection, fascinating stories about bead-design, history and the different uses of beads unfurled.  All the new insights I gained about bead-related customs and beliefs of old and new world cultures have become an important source of inspiration for my own beaded jewelry.

We often think that beads and beaded jewelry are only one of the many forms of adornment which man has created.  In our modern world the overall function of jewelry has been reduced to the enhancement of personal beauty and the display of social status and wealth.  We seem to have forgotten the spiritual context which always has surrounded jewelry.  This spiritual context is probably most visible in ethnic jewelry which was mainly designed to reflect distinct religious beliefs, ritual practices and the need for protective and curative powers.  Remnants of such beliefs are still in practice today such as the use of rosaries, the wedding ring or the piece of jade (in China) and the silver bracelet (in the West) given to children for protection.  The jewelry medium which has been most associated with spiritual and protective functions are beads.  Spiritual messages or protective magic could be induced to the wearer either visually through bead design, color or shape or through materials using the tactile senses.

Learning more about the symbolism of bead design, the meaning of color and the properties associated with particular stones made me reconnect with some of man's most basic beliefs and needs stemming from a time when man still perceived himself as part of nature.  Incorporating these "new" concepts and creating beaded jewelry was not only an intellectual challenge but also a creative challenge.

Creating beaded jewelry is in a broad sense a form of teamwork - between nature as the provider of the material, the artisans who make the beads and the person who creates the final piece of jewelry.  As an artistic medium beads provide the artist with an wide array of shapes, materials and colors to be arranged in an unlimited number of ways.  In some ways it is like composing music.  The composer is creating musical harmonies interpreted by different musicians and instruments which he has to carefully choose and arrange so that the overall composition becomes harmonic and balanced.

At a time when man is so used to automation and mass production, we often associate beaded jewelry with cheap third world craft.  I hope to show with my exhibition "Strings of Fantasy" that there is another side to beaded jewelry.  The works on exhibit feature one-of-a-kind pieces of jewelry created from hand-picked beads which I have collected from all over the world.  My jewelry not only combines different materials, colors and shapes but also the new with the old, the hand-made with the machine-made and the Oriental with the Western.  It is an attempt to create visual harmonies - delightful to the eye and up-lifting to the spirit when worn - strings of fantasy.