BeadFaces

In 2020, during the lockdown, I and my partner -- who is also an artist/photographer -- asked a friend who makes beautiful handmade glass items in Kenya, to send us something to work with during the unknown time we'd be confined to our home and thus to studio photography. Unfortunately, or so we thought, he had already packed away everything we usually photographed. All he had left were glass beads, so he sent those. I was so enthralled by these miniature works of glass art that I photographed them every day for a year, thinking up increasingly intricate ways to use them as photographic subjects. Thus the Bead Face Project was born. I loved these Bead Faces. They allowed me to capture the rollercoaster of emotions that the whole world experienced during that first, frightening Covid year 2020, before the vaccines came out. Bead Faces let me depict delight, amusement, snark, weariness, worry, fear, delight, hope, uncertainty, shock, grief, awe, and more. I felt all the feelings. Art is all about human emotion. BeadFaces, as an art form and as an art practice, is simply about being human. We feel, therefore we are. It is a healthy human condition to feel all your feelings.