Thematic Essay | Style The Resilient StyleBy Juliet Gellée
April 13, 2010 |
Beads were meant to be worn and seen, illustrating that one’s life was different from others with improvisational color sequencing, a changing grammar of shapes, and nuanced repetition of simple patterns. |
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Under the Roof of Blue Ionian Weather -Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema (1903) |
Ancient bead design reflected the human passion for individuality. It was possible, within the artistic space of bead design, to create a visual energy, which, through sublimal suggestion or charismatic power, re-conceived the human spirit.
Beads were meant to be worn and seen, illustrating that one’s life was different from others, with improvisational color sequencing, a changing grammar of shapes, and nuanced repetition.
Bead design transformed the experience of individuality into an artistic consciousness of what the mind perceived as symbolic. If an ancient bead could speak it would have many interesting stories to tell about the entwining of handwork and design and the beginnings of an art that was rarely simply what it appeared to be, and whose essence, in its highest degree of musical elegance, was poetry.
In this way bead design became an eloquent and universally accepted art, like storytelling or dance, which recognized the need for social cohesion and the need to be an individual.
As skills and techniques of bead making evolved, bead design became as elaborate and creative as the people who wore them. For thousands of years beads were handed-down by one generation after another, offered as rite of passage to an afterlife, used as ornament in innumerable ways, and traded as currency, while retaining their symbolic clarity and sense of place.
Today, bead design offsets the processes of modernization that contribute to distancing people from their pasts and restores a personal element to ornament. Its properties and motifs change over and over, yet its essence has lasted down through the ages. Just as we physically inherit aspects of our ancestors' experience, bead design retains its ancient style and power to re-conceive the human spirit.
