Portfolio
Below is an abbreviated portfolio which outlines the details of my beadwork practice from a technical, weaving-oriented angle. Feel free to peruse the "work" tab on my site for more context on the extent of my practice and the ideas I work with.
Below is an abbreviated portfolio which outlines the details of my beadwork practice from a technical, weaving-oriented angle. Feel free to peruse the "work" tab on my site for more context on the extent of my practice and the ideas I work with.
Instructionals (2023-Ongoing)
Glass beads (size 11 Czech rocailles), peyote and modified herringbone weaves
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The beadwork shown at left has a complex surface geometry made possible by a threadpath that I developed during an art & research fellowship with the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork (CGB) project. This threadpath combines peyote and herringbone weave structures, which is a common strategy for adding angles into geometric beadwork, but my innovation allows for the insertion of a herringbone seam into peyote-woven fabric without adding a new angle, dart, or ruffle to the piece. This effectively allows for seams, folds, joints, and hinges to be inserted into a continuously woven shape without altering its edge or surface geometry. The beadwork pictured here is just one exploration of how these hinges can be exploited to create complex morphing (folding / interlocking) surfaces.
Original techniques like this are closely-guarded assets in craft communities like the one surrounding CGB, because they largely rely on selling proprietary patterns. In contrast, as part of a project tentatively titled Instructionals, this beadwork will be presented along with a series of technical drawings, charts, and texts which detail precisely how to (re)make the beadwork. During my fellowship, I worked to understand and develop new systems of notation, illustration, and documentation of such specialized craft knowledge so that it might be translated across different communities and applied to different art, craft, and STEM frameworks. Instructionals will take a more creative approach to technical communication, using it as an artistic framework in itself, while pushing notation, illustration, and step-by-step instruction to the brink of utility. Conceived in the current climate of ever-increasing institutionalization and intellectualization of the arts, Instructionals takes a distinctly weaving-based look at the contemporary genre of "art-as-research." |
Above: Full view of a small segment of beadwork, 9 x 14 x 1 inches.
Below: Full view of the beadwork progress for Instructionals, which will continue to grow. Currently 43.5 x 30 x 1 inches.
Below: Full view of the beadwork progress for Instructionals, which will continue to grow. Currently 43.5 x 30 x 1 inches.
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The video at left demonstrates some of the morphing behaviors of a different but similar beadwork structure of mine. Left: An illustration of the second step of weaving the seamed triangle shape that forms the base unit of the weaving depicted above. This exaggerated illustration style invokes the difficulties of illustrating bead-weaving processes legibly and aesthetically.
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Left: Notation chart, one method of communication and documentation inspired by bead patterns sold by professional and hobby beaders. The lower half of the chart shows what the beading notation system developed during my fellowship looks like.
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When walls grow towards you (2022)
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This piece was made for The House Protects the Dreamer, a two-person show at Kingfish Gallery in 2022. It is made of hundreds of conjoined triangles and studies the way that rounded beads warp flat geometric tile patterns.
Hand-woven glass beads (size 10 Czech rocailles, peyote & herringbone weave), jewelry chain, found housekey, acrylic paint, molding 27 x 24 inches. |
Partial Installation view of The House Protects the Dreamer, in 2022 with Krystal DiFronzo at Kingfish in Buffalo, NY
COVID Tapestries
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In 2020, the mounting emotional and political unrest heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic inspired me to use beadwork and weaving structures to examine how specific material qualities—namely transparency, tactility, and entanglement—might uniquely represent the affects of that fraught moment. Here I experiment with mixed techniques, negotiating tensions between competing weave structures to achieve harmony and explore themes of entanglement, complexity, and cooperation. Through this, these weavings become material metaphor for the social conflicts and pressures experienced during this time.
See more about these on the project page. Left: Small Stories from the Shadow Summer (2020). Hand-woven glass beads, jewelry chain, 28.5 x 15.5 inches. Detail below |
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This "tapestry" uses netting, loom-weaving, and freeform stringing techniques. The entire piece is woven from transparent glass Czech rocaille beads; the color imagery at the center is achieved by using colored thread in the weft of the loom-weaving process, and texture is added by using both size 10 and size 6 beads. |
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Contact Tracing: The Slick Spine of Rumor (2020). Hand-woven glass beads, jewelry chain, 27 x 18 inches. This piece uses loom weaving, netting, and knotting techniques and is made with size 10 Czech rocailles and iridescent twisted bugle beads. |
Above you can see the "spine" of loom-woven twisted bugles running down the center of the piece.
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Contact Tracing: Rings of Influence (2020). Hand-woven glass beads, jewelry chain, 35 x 28 inches. This piece uses experimental approaches to interwoven netting and bead crochet techniques, all in size 10 Czech rocailles. Close-ups below. |
Tulips 2022
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Tulips is a series of experimental works that explore different applications of technical beadweaving methods and act as color studies that consider the ways shiny, reflective, iridescent, and transparent surfaces interact with color. Hinging on the interplay between frame and image, these pieces also look at the relationship between decoration, function, and symbology. These works integrate my CGB Fellowship research on creating calculated angles and freeform structure in continuously woven beaded forms (as opposed to forms assembled from conjoined pieces of beadwork). See more on the project page. At left, Tulips, Silver (2022). Acrylic on Yupo, hand-woven glass beads, jewelry chain. This piece is made from size 11 Myuki brand Delica beads, which are precision-cut glass cylinders that allow for precise geometric calculation. Along the sides of the frame, you can see pyramid spikes that have been woven to grow organically from the peyote-weave fabric. The corners and bezel mechanism of the frame are also created from beaded angle calculations. |
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Tulips, Red (2022). Acrylic on Yupo, hand-woven glass beads, jewelry chain. This piece is also peyote-woven with size eleven Delica beads. The beaded frame is one continuously woven fabric with corners and ripples built into the weave structure. |
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Tulips, Green (2022). Acrylic on Yupo, hand-woven glass beads, jewelry chain. To create the unique ornamental structure of this frame, this piece incorporates more experimental work with bead-woven angle structures using peyote, herringbone, and combination stitches. |
And the Fates Put Down Their Hands (2020)
Above: Installation view of And the Fates Put Down Their Hands
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This body of work, shown in 2021 at Sager Reeves Gallery, is staged around four key sculptures made of hand-woven glass beads: a crown, a robe, a shirt, and three pairs of gloves. Loom weaving, square stitch, and peyote weaving techniques are all used to create these wearable sculptures.
Referencing the prominent role that clothing, adornment, and textiles play in storytelling about femininity, this project addresses the power that making, wearing, and imagining have when used as tools to unpack internalized cultural narratives. While beadwork is often reserved for embellishment or jewelry-scale work, my use of beads to make the very fabric of these pieces is an attempt to illustrate the alchemy one performs when shifting a supporting role into the spotlight. Together, the works in this show summon stories of goddesses, witches, femme fatales, spinsters, hysterics, oracles, selkies, rusalkas, and all their many relations. As wearable, semi-functional forms, they hold places for bodies—real or imagined—but they also stand in for bodies themselves. The invitation (or temptation) to wear them encapsulates the blurring between self-determination and self-allegorization. See more about this work on the project page. |
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All three pairs of beaded gloves were made with size 10 round glass beads woven directly onto my hands using square stitch, which allows for organic structure and freeform weaving. Left: The hands that measure (2020). |
Above: The hands that cut (2020). Hand-woven glass beads, wearable sculpture.
Above: The Cassandra Crown (2020). Hand-woven size 10 Czech glass rocaille beads. 8 inches in diameter. Woven using mixed geometric peyote and rope weaving techniques.
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Above: The Robe of Submergence (2020). Hand-woven glass seed beads. Approximately 33 x 39 inches, flat, 10 pounds.
Below: Of Knowledge, Weaving, and War (2018). Hand-woven glass beads. Approximately 32 x 28 inches, flat, 4.5 pounds.
Each of these works are made of loom-woven sections of beadwork that were designed like a sewing pattern to be stitched together into their respective garments.
Below: Of Knowledge, Weaving, and War (2018). Hand-woven glass beads. Approximately 32 x 28 inches, flat, 4.5 pounds.
Each of these works are made of loom-woven sections of beadwork that were designed like a sewing pattern to be stitched together into their respective garments.
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Partial installation view of And the Fates Put Down Their Hands at Sager Reeves Gallery, 2021 |