Beloved Beadwork
Silver in Cape Town

At Beloved we do as our name suggests, using hours of loving labour and perfectly formed, we make beloved items of personal adornment, tiny pieces of glass.
We don’t think of our work as African craft.

There's a conversation we find ourselves repeatedly having in our shops. We'll brag to a visitor about the amazing Japanese glass seed beads we use in our work, and they'll say 'oh, why don't you use South African ones?'. We'll explain that South Africa doesn't have, and never has had, a glass seed bead factory. At this point we discover quite how Eurocentric many of our education systems are, because many people's next assumption is that glass seed beads must therefore have arrived with European sailors and colonisers. The world trade in small glass beads is, in fact, at least three centuries older than Christianity. Britain was busy being invaded by the Belgics and Julius Caesar when the trade was getting underway in the pacific. We began the planning a few weeks ago and we are finally ready to start stringing it. A few years ago we developed a system for making enormous beaded artworks using 5mm glass seed beads, which make a solid, yet transparent image. The largest we ever made was nine metres wide and three metres tall. What is lacks in width, however, it more than makes up for in complexity! So what began as a visual arts project has now also become an academic exercise in trying to get my hands on as much data as possible. Every text referenced in another was available to me in the absurdly well stocked library or online. When we finish we'll have a time-lapse video of the whole piece being made. Stories, thoughts, images, and links of varying relevance to our work at our beautiful studio in Cape Town, South Africa.