thursday hazelgrove
Beading is slow. It's quiet. It's mostly stillness. With Miyuki Delica beads there is this beautiful *snap* sound/feeling when you tug the thread and the beads move into formation. And for all the "making" you might think you're up to, there is also an emergence that has very little to do with you. It often feels like the Beauty is just borrowing your hands. I try to pick colours that look like they don't go together, and see what happens when you ask them to. I work things out while I'm beading. There's so much to learn from beading that the rest of life doesn't offer up so easily: patience, humility, practice, making mistakes, taking pause, unraveling, when to give up, when not to give up, the good company of stillness, solitude, and silence. I pray while I sew, or rather, the sewing is a kind of prayer. I sew prayers of protection into all of my pieces.
And I'm also a white lady, which is really important to acknowledge as a woman who beads in North America. I do not come from a tradition of beading. I am not Indigenous. I have no ancestors who beaded (I don't think). I learned in a kitchen late at night, from another settler. This art form, this practice has not been passed down to me along any lines of tradition or lineage. I work in and with the tension of settler colonialism on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and Musqueam xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. We live on stolen land and the people whose land it is are still very much here in spite of our country's best efforts to entirely erase them and all memory of our collective and ongoing crimes against them.
That there is history is not the question, how we move with and relate to our histories, is.
My goal is to work with integrity. I am always working hard to identify and unravel my collusion with oppression as a white woman, which is important to me for the specific purpose of refusing to allow my body, my life and my work to be used as a weapon against my neighbours in this magnificent world; a world that deserves our full attention and utmost respect.
Big Love, Ursula Twiss
And I'm also a white lady, which is really important to acknowledge as a woman who beads in North America. I do not come from a tradition of beading. I am not Indigenous. I have no ancestors who beaded (I don't think). I learned in a kitchen late at night, from another settler. This art form, this practice has not been passed down to me along any lines of tradition or lineage. I work in and with the tension of settler colonialism on the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish) and Musqueam xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. We live on stolen land and the people whose land it is are still very much here in spite of our country's best efforts to entirely erase them and all memory of our collective and ongoing crimes against them.
That there is history is not the question, how we move with and relate to our histories, is.
My goal is to work with integrity. I am always working hard to identify and unravel my collusion with oppression as a white woman, which is important to me for the specific purpose of refusing to allow my body, my life and my work to be used as a weapon against my neighbours in this magnificent world; a world that deserves our full attention and utmost respect.
Big Love, Ursula Twiss