Laura Jean McCabe is a primarily self-taught beadweaver with an training in historic costume replica and restoration, and anthropology. She produces elaborately beaded physique adornment that mixes Native American, African Zulu, and Victorian beadweaving methods with fashionable supplies and colour schemes. She reveals her work in nationwide and worldwide beadwork exhibitions, and sells her completed work all through the USA and the world and thru this web site: www.LauraMcCabeArt.com. She maintains a studio in Outdated Mystic, Connecticut, and teaches beading workshops domestically and overseas.
For hundreds of years these inventive acts which were most frequently related to physique adornment not often have been accorded the standing of Artwork. Whereas beadwork has existed in nearly each tradition all through the world for the reason that beginnings of recent man, and has performed a big position each spiritually (with amuletic properties) and socially (as an indicator of standing), it’s usually seen as a useful craft reasonably than an Artwork kind in its personal proper.
Beads and beadwork have, all through time, maintained a common attraction that hyperlinks folks throughout cultures and throughout the ages. Beads date again greater than 40,000 years, and are a uniquely human phenomenon, not discovered amongst different primates and even earlier human species. Along with serving the human wants of vainness, adornment, and social standing, beads have a deeper, extra religious facet. They’ve offered us luck, safety from evil forces, and a hyperlink to a extra religious realm (each by way of prayer beads and elaborately beaded ritual physique adornment).
From early hunter gatherers within the pre-agricultural age, to the Historic Worlds of Egypt, Greece and Rome, onto Renaissance Europe, Tribal Africa, the Orient, Native America, the Victorian Interval, and up by way of the Fashionable Period, beadwork has represented an uninterrupted custom all through time amongst nearly each tradition on Earth. In a world of human variations, beadwork is a standard hyperlink, fulfilling essentially the most elementary human wants.
It’s on this historical past of historic traditions, religious significance, timeless handcraft, and human commonality that the Artwork of Beads may be discovered. They characterize greater than precision handwork, private adornment, or social significance. Every bead, beneath its lustrous floor, tells an age outdated story of human concern, human want, and the human want for magnificence.
By drawing on my training in historic costume and textiles and making use of variations of Native American, African Zulu, and Victorian beading methods to modern colours and designs, I attempt to create beaded physique adornment that celebrates and reincarnates the dying custom of fantastic handcrafts, and helps to raise beadwork to the standing of Artwork which it undeniably deserves.
