Category: beadwork

Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Kathleen Ryan

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Artist Kathleen Ryan creates a conversation between the beautiful and the grotesque in her oversized sculptures of mold-covered fruit.Ryan turns blight to beauty, using precious and semi-precious stones like malachite, garnet, opal, tiger’s eye, and smoky quartz to form a design of common rot on beautiful, ripe fruit.

Her larger-than-life foam bases are modeled on ripe fruits such as lemons and cherries.She uses variously-sized faceted stones; stones cut into spheres, cubes, and tetrahedrons; stones carved into shapes, for example, blossoms; as well as raw rocks and seashells.Ryan is redefining the interpretation of rotting fruit — bruised, green and white mold, even a gathering of fruit flies become sparkling masterpieces as beauty turns into ugly and back.Her “Bad Fruit” sculptures are a representation of the innate beauty and life of decay.“The sculptures are beautiful and pleasurable, but there’s an ugliness and unease that comes with them,” Ryan says. “They’re not just opulent, there’s an inherent sense of decline built into them.”More of Kathleen Ryan‘s amazing work can be found at New York Times and the Green Art Gallery.

 

Sunday Evening Art Gallery — Nancy Cain

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Nancy Cain has always been fascinated with handcrafts, whether it was clay, paper, buttons, fabric or simply found objects.Cain studied art in college and worked as a graphic artist for 16 years, all the while exploring various handcraft techniques. She found her artistic niche in beads.Cain’s favorite stitch is peyote and over the years has only added two other stitches, netting then herringbone.  

She calls these three stitches ‘sister-stitches’, since they transition from one stitch to the other effortlessly.

 

Her style is clean and contemporary with minimalist embellishment. She likes the structure to shine through.“I feel that the beads alone give me the most inspiration. If you understand the physics (mechanics and technicality) of the stitch, then you can create whatever your heart desires.” Cain explains.

:Knowing what each bead size, shape and finish will do and how they react with each other, plus how the beads respond to thread weight and use, the sky is the limit for designing.”

 

More of Nancy Cain‘s amazing beadwork can be found at http://nancycain.com/. 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday Evening Art Gallery on Wednesday — Teri Greeves

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Teri Greeves was born and raised on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming among the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho .

Teri’s mother, Jeri Ah-be-hill, owned a trading post on the reservation while Greeves was growing up. “By repeating to customers what I heard her saying when she was selling to and educating the public,” Teri says, “I unknowingly gained a broad knowledge of different beadwork from tribes around the US.”

Blending the abstract, geometric tradition of Kiowa beadwork with the more pictorial style of the Shoshone, Greeves has developed her own visual language.

Greeves has become an award-winning beadwork artist, mostly known for her fully-beaded tennis shoes, which feature Indian pictorial elements.“I must express myself and my experience as a 21st century Kiowa and I do it, like all those unknown artists before me, through beadwork,” Greeves says.

“And though my medium may be considered ‘craft’ or ‘traditional’, my stories are from the same source as the voice running through that first Kiowa beadworker’s needles. It is the voice of my grandmothers.”

Her work is fun and amazing, pulling on the tradition of her ancestors to keep her flowing through modern times.

More of Teri Greeves‘ unique beadwork can be found at https://www.terigreevesbeadwork.com.