Finding Silence: Art and the Creative Process

I am a self-taught bead embroidery fanatic, having been taught to sew by the age of 4 by my impoverished immigrant mother who was creative through hard economic necessity.  I took up beading at the age of 54 to help with my persistently vexing dyslexia and equally wonderful synaesthesia but it has not helped one bit.  I wrote a piece on my blog a few years ago about the different forms of intelligence in life and how we are often pigeonholed into existing within certain predetermined paradigms, largely through the often unbending ignorance and arrogance of humanity.  As a dyslexic, I grew up thinking I was stupid because this idea was often thrown my way by teachers during my traumatic school years.  My lack of self-worth was compounded by my parents who denied me an education, stating that women were worthless to educate, being only good to run a house and have a family.  If you hear something often enough, you end up believing it.

My beading journey was prompted by a wonderful interview I heard on ABC radio in South Australia one night about a woman in America who has a consultancy practice that deals with fostering neuron development in people.  This woman declared that we are able to alter the neurons in our brains to work around issues in life.  The woman also explained that she never flew a particular airline without finding out whether the pilot who consulted her for assistance with neuron development was flying the craft.  The pilot declared that he had memories of stepping onto the plane and landing with precious little memory in between.  Right ….. I think I’ll take the bus…..  I’d like to say that beading has improved my dyslexia but it hasn’t.  I inhabit an alternative world view, that’s all.  The process of threading tiny Czech and Japanese beads onto a fine beading needle though, continue to mesmerise my imagination.

I love designing and making bold jewellery for women who know what they like and are not afraid to wear it.  “Go bold or go home.”  A lot of my pieces sell overseas.  I love colour, form and texture, being a pastel and acrylic painter and felt artist.  I bead part of most days of the week in my work room. When not beading, I am thinking about beads and their endless possibilities. I even dream up designs and work around design issues just before waking up. The magical twilight zone has greatly assisted me with my one of a kind designs and I use this priceless gift across all my artistic pursuits, including journal making and embellished felt work paintings and felted bags with loads of beads and slow stitched threads. 

How long is a piece of string for the artist?  I really cannot answer this conundrum because the many artists I have come across in life all seem to be transfixed with detailing the polar opposites – the minutiae and grandness of life through their chosen medium.  Though, when I consider the formal meaning of “minutiae”, I think this is not the right term to use for the intense focus artists impose on their visual passions in life.  Everything we see as artists has meaning and significance and importance in our world view; no matter how large or how small.  Our hands are mere conduits for a rich veining of creativity that comes from I know not where. 

I really think that we need to stop and stand still for a while every so often and start connecting with our surroundings and appreciate what lies around us and has been there all the time.  For me personally, my art journey has been a stepping off point to access that rich silence that often allows the creative vein to deliver colour, form and textural joys. 

Without a peaceful silence at times replete with bird song, the gentle sigh of the wind travelling through the Melaleuca stand, the scent of Bass Strait and the roar of the not too distant surf that pounds the shore at night to announce the imminent arrival of a storm, the colour, form and texture vein just won’t open for me personally.

More of my works can be viewed here: www.theonlineartgallery.com.au