I have a vivid memory, of when I was perhaps four or five, of picking seed beads off a fraying, loom woven Amerindian belt because the belt came in more colors than any beads I possessed. My mother, to whom the belt belonged, never realized until I told her some years later, why it disintegrated merely for hanging in her closet. My sole source, at that time, for beads of any kind was Frank's Nursery and Crafts, and their selection was pretty limited. Eventually I did loom weave a piece, with eagle feathers, arrows and the like, with my name worked in. I never finished it, and years later I took it apart because I thought it was ugly. (The lesson here is too save your earliest efforts no matter how badly you despise them; someday you'll want to look at ’em again, to see how far you've come, if nothing else.)

So, snarky comments aside, my earliest memories were with seed beads. I started really playing with them again for much the same reason I'd taken up stone and larger glass beads some years before: because I discovered, at long last, decent sources for them. Beadwork, as opposed to making individual beads, comes out of two traditions: metalworking and textile. I tend to hew to the latter, which I find ironic because although I've taken metalworking classes on a sporadic basis since high school I've never had any formal training weaving. Though I love all beads, the difficulty with seed beads is that the individual components disappear into a fabric, as tiles do in a mosaic. You don't see individual tiles.

I've concluded that my real interest lies in playing with interface, or boundary, between individual beads and the overall piece, difficult with such small beads, though I generate some interest in varying sizes of seed beads—the red and yellow peyote stitched donut and the Bumblebee are good examples. Most of the variation in the latter, however, comes from the contrast between the strung and woven elements.

Now that I feel fairly comfortable with some of the more common stitches–peyote, single-needle right-angle weave, brick and square–I've started to work larger beads into the weaving stitches, as well, and I think this is a promising direction. The stickpin is perhaps the first piece that really explores this theme.

Works are ordered more or less chronologically. (N.b. the above was basically written sometime in the mid-to-late 90s: I recall making similar arguments much earlier, likely the early 90s, to the Michigan Guild of Artists and Artisans after they decided that Bumblebee was good enough to on the program cover, but not good enough to be in their Greektown show, though I'd have to go back and look at the dates on transparencies to know when I was actively jurying with the piece; however, I didn't, so far as I know, start creating web pages until 1996 or so, about the time I tentatively began lampworking.

So the sentiment dates back further than the actual writing. I should note at the current time I'm not exploring seed beads much with weaving or embroidery, that is, as individual components that recede or come forth or balance between those two. That is not to say I've lost all interest in the concept, merely that I'm doing it on a bigger scale. One could argue that the bead curtain, for example, works both as a singular object, as individual beads, and, can, depending upon the viewer's interest and distance from it, switch from one to the other, or possibly even achieve a sort of equilibrium in which individual strands are foremost.)

Update 14aug04: I've added a couple of pieces, and made text links to the all files in this directory (though if you can't see the pictures, why you would bother...); update 18oct06: I've reversed the chronology to put the most recent pieces first; and substituted a subindex that collects all the beadwoven pieces, which is to say, both Margaret and Gail's stuff.

Work by other artists:

modified: Sun Aug 15 02:15:28 2004; 18oct06

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.

Sylvus Tarn