"Melissa Earley"
About the technique:
I have been as influenced by the work of craftspeople:
potters, woodworkers, glass blowers, etc., as I have been by
traditional “fine” artists. I
was a jewelry designer for a few years and it was in that capacity, hoping
to expand my skills, that I first began bead weaving. The technique was perfected over hundreds of years by several
different Native American nations, and I loved it immediately. First of all, when I’m painting I never know when the work is
done. I will keep touching
things up and adding on to it for months, never satisfied that it’s
quite ready. With the
beadwork, you follow a pattern and it’s done when it’s done. There’s no guesswork and there’s no going back and touching up
later. More importantly,
however, the glass beads create this satisfyingly intricate stained glass
effect, and the bright, candy colors of the beads make the imagery less
severe and more palatable. Thus,
the pieces are generally small, intimate, and easier to digest,
emotionally speaking.
Most of the pieces in this show were woven off-loom using peyote stitch,
which is recognizable by the brickwork pattern of the beads.
Most of the larger pieces, especially those using plastic beads,
were woven using a variation of square stitch, which simply looks like
uniform rows on top of each other, and adds to the “pixilated” quality
of the image. A few pieces in
this show, most notably the ones that incorporate lots of visible thread
into the presentation of the work, were woven on a loom.
About
the imagery:
Most of
the time I start drawing, rather automatically and absentmindedly, and
eventually find an image that speaks to me. Then I do a preliminary painting, create a pattern to work from,
and begin beading it. As the
final image takes shape, or maybe even later, once I’ve lived with it
for a little while, it dawns on me that I’ve created yet another self
portrait. I’ve ended up
surrounding myself with little bits and pieces of my own psyche, made
manifest in beads.
I equate this process with a kind of “journaling,” in that what I
create is rather stream of conscious and ends up teaching me something
about myself or jogging a long-forgotten memory, which in turns helps me
understand who I am and why I do the things I do. Life is complicated, messy, and sometimes even terrifying, so
having this outlet for self-reflection and meditation has been a great way
to help me hold onto my sanity in the face of all that anxiety and stress. Facing it, examining it, and seeing it from a number of different
angles makes it more manageable and less scary.
Lately I
have worked more and more with family photographs, breaking them down in
my computer to be stark black and white pixilated copies of the originals. These lend
themselves to a perfect beadwork pattern, and it has been interesting to
use images created via photography and Photoshop as a starting point, then
using the ancient
technique of bead weaving to create the final piece. They end up not being self portraits, exactly, but examinations of
the most important and influential people in my life.