Rachel Nelson-Smith

There is a flutter in my heart inspired by beads that has been like a solar-powered battery with energy renewed every day since 1993. To say I am obsessed would be an understatement. To say I love beads is not enough; I get inside them and they inside me. Deep love for color and form manifest my dreams in beads, driving me to fritter away hundreds of hours on minutia as small as one-millimeter square. Work with lampwork glass artists opens creative vistas inaccessible to me alone and leads to unspoken parts of my undersense. During thousands of hours that bead and thread and needle have rolled in my fingers, a translation of my consciousness is recorded in physical form. What I do is not the beadwork of anyone’s younger sister when she was a kid. This is serious grown-up stuff where hypotheses are tested, mistakes are made and time is spent without regard, and through the process sometimes something glorious flows through me.