I am very, very pleased to announce that Beloved Beadwork will have a stand at the Designer-Maker Market at the Freeworld Design Centre this Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
The list of exhibitors reads like a who’s-who of designers in Cape Town, and I am deeply proud that we have been selected. Here’s a video of last year’s market:
Our days are happy at the moment at Beloved. We’re the good kind of busy. Christmas is coming and we’ve got lots of lovely orders.
On Saturday, we were invited to the Freedom To Create award ceremony. Nomakhwezi, Nambitha, Mado, Therese and I attended. It was a wonderful evening.
And today is a Wednesday. Wednesdays are always good at Beloved, because we have christened them our Chocolate Brownie Wednesdays! A small market is held in the shopping centre just down the road from us featuring lots of small producers, one of whom makes incredible brownies. So they are our midweek treat!
You may remember sometime ago we posted about the visit of the World Design Capital adjudicators to Montebello. Back then, waiting until the end of October to hear the news felt like a million years away. But, as always, time has flown by, and this morning they made the announcement. ANDWEGOTIT! It is just fantastic news.
There are many aspects to being a small business owner that are similar to having a young child. These are noticeable to me in part because my colleague actually brings her baby to work!
One of those aspects is the constant combination of sleep-deprivation and anxiety, mixed with pure love and adoration. I love love love my business, and there has never been a time before in my life where I have worked so hard. The to-do list never ends, I have to work weird hours, and whenever I’m working on one thing, there are seven other things I should be doing which are probably more important. I love it, and my day-to-day-ness has never been more busy, energised or happy. And I definitely don’t sleep as much as I should!
This high-octane lifestyle has been assisted in part by spending some good time with a dietician. She helped me drop some extra weight yes, but more importantly she taught me how to eat for sustained energy (learn to do this, it’s awesome! Seriously.). I used to be the sort of person who would drop off on the sofa at around 9.30pm, often assisted by excessive carbs, and nowadays I have to convince myself at 1am that I really should go to bed.
So when I get the warning signs that I’m getting really tired, I try to take notice, because I know that my body and brain are not just trying it on, they really are reaching their limit. Rarely, I caught myself falling asleep at work this afternoon, and decided to go with it and have a lazy early evening. It was wonderful!
I dropped the dog at home and headed off to my dear friend’s house. She is a very special friend for all manner of reasons. A few follow. Her apartment is more filled with beads than mine. She is the best, most honest fashion adviser a girl could ever need. She is the sort of person you can phone at 1am to deconstruct a first date, and she will give you actual advise. She has the most diverse group of friends you could ever imagine, she has introduced me to some seriously awesome people in this city. She is from Texas. She is absurdly talented, and yet somehow she manages to make you feel good about yourself, even though you could never reach her levels of achievement. Her hips are seemingly quadruple jointed, which makes watching her dance the most mind-altering experience. She consumes a quantity of sparkling water that probably keeps one person at the beverage company fully employed. And, when you enter her apartment, she hands you a plate of whatever it is she’s baked or cooked that afternoon. Today, it was carrot and zucchini muffins with the cream cheese icing on the inside. They soothed my soul.
I lay on her sofa, chatting with her, her lovely man, and a gorgeous mutual friend, listening to Jill Scott, watching the cloud change over Table Mountain, letting myself drift in and out of blissful semi-consciousness, and feeling the traffic creep up Kloof Nek below us. I love the sound of traffic. I grew up with bedroom windows that looked out onto main roads, and I always sleep better when I can hear cars and buses going by. I couldn’t help thinking of my favourite novel, Skyline, by local writer Patricia Schonstein Pinnock:
‘We buy Cokes at 7Eleven and sit outside drinking, watching the flow of cars move through Long Street and split up at the intersection. I’m used to the traffic and the way it washes through my mind, swirling with changing rhythms. It is a moving, liquid, smooth and soothing music; a song of haunting sounds and hootings woven from the speed and rushings of the city. The traffic is a song which plays my feelings as though they were a string instrument or distant drum. It erases all silences within me.’
When I first moved to my lovely house in 2005, the garden immediately presented itself as somewhat of a challenge. The house is perfectly modest; two small bedrooms, an office, and open living room and kitchen, and one bathroom. But the garden is a little less modest, it is in fact 100m2 (10m x 10m). I have struggled to do anything constructive with it over the years, but this year my mum and I, when she visited in July, decided to beat it into submission! Intrigued by the concept of keyhole gardens, which are being encouraged and used quite widely across Africa, we tried out one of our own. It’s been going for just over two months now, and, together with my square deep beds, is providing me with more greens than I can eat!
(The basic idea of the keyhole garden is that you put your raw kitchen scraps straight into the basket in the middle, and pour used washing up water on top. This helps the scraps to decompose quickly, and takes the resulting nutrients straight into the garden with the water.)
Cape Town is a migrant city, and our team is no exception. All of us were born and raised elsewhere. When, sat across from one another at the work table, we are talking about where we grew up and what it was like, the providence of the land is a frequent topic.
I grew up in old English vicarages, always with large gardens. We kept chickens and doves, and my mum always had vegetables, herbs, fruit and salad greens on the go. To this day, the pride on her face when she puts food on the table which she grew herself is simply unrivaled!
Francine, who runs the shop on a Tuesday and Saturday, grew up in Rwanda, and she can talk at length about the fruits and vegetables that her fertile land of a thousand hills could provide. She tells us about wondering out to surrounding fields to dig potatoes, and trees heavy with ripe avocados. Francine loves freshly picked produce, so I was really happy to take her a big bag of salad today. She was delighted. We at Beloved are so blessed to be part of a company of such earnest, good people as Francine.
So, my morning was spent in the garden. And the afternoon was spent at Big Bay, collecting pebbles for our Treasured Finds range of jewellery. Moneo and I had a lovely time.
Photos of the resulting jewellery will follow shortly. First the pebbles must be washed in boiling water, then rubbed with cocoa butter, before they are surrounded with tiny pieces of glass, ready to be worn.
My trips up to Joburg for SA Fashion Week can best be described as pilgrimages of passion. I travel there to present the accessories that Beloved Beadwork has spent the previous month designing to accompany Palesa Mokubung’s amazing clothing on the catwalks.
I first encountered Palesa’s work long before we met. I’m a big fan of musician Thandiswa Mazwai and I would watch their performances mesmorised both by her music, and the incredible outfits she wore.
In February this year, I was busy preparing a presentation to give at the National Gallery titled ‘What Inspires Me in South African Visual Culture’. Top of the list was Thandiswa’s style, and it would seem fate was on my side, because also giving a presentation that day was Palesa, who, it turned out, often dresses Thandiswa!
So unbeknownst to me I was already being inspired by the designer I would come to work with. That very day we decided to collaborate, and two months later we worked together at April’s SA Fashion Week.
It is somewhat soul restoring to spend time in the company of a designer who you so admire, and who’s style somehow marries with your own so perfectly. It is always with great trepidation that I head up to Joburg, and I always with a great sense of joy and accomplishment that I return home.
So without further ado, here are some of the photographs!
All images are copyright: Gary Stemmett / SDR Photo, and can be found on their site here.
I’ll be putting up some lightbox-photographed images of the individual pieces of jewellery soon. Watch this space.
Thanks for another amazing SA Fashion Week Palesa.
One of the things I love about working at Montebello Design Centre is the people I meet, and the beautiful things that result from these random meetings. Recently, two lovely, enthusiastic women came in, took one look at the beaded stones I was making, and said ‘please won’t you bead some shells we have?’. They went on to explain why these shells were precious to them - one was found in an ancient shell midden on the West Coast of South Africa, another had been dived for a couple of decades ago.
Beading them was pure joy. Something about their shape and form lends them to beaded edges so perfectly. They were easily the most beautiful pendants I’ve ever made.
These pieces are actually a small part of the Alikreukel Shell, the door or lip to it’s mouth! There is more information here on Wiki.
Thanks to Michelle for sending through the images.
A friend has since given me a very aged and polished Alikreukel shell door. I’ll share the images as soon as it’s done.
Stick around, we’ll be publishing images from Fashion Week tomorrow!
We are probably as ‘family friendly’ as a workplace can be! Anyone who works for Beloved is welcome to bring their kids with to work, we even have a big box full of educational toys for them to play with, and Kwalapa has a lovely children’s playground which they can visit. Recently, Danny and Sino took a break from their hectic play schedule to eat some biscuits. And I took a break to photograph them doing so. Enjoy!
I’m really enjoying watching A Country Imagined hosted by Johnny Clegg on SABC3 at the moment. Today he introduced the work of Santu Mofukeng. And wow! I’m blown away. What beauty.
It all happened in a flash really! All of a sudden the adjudicators for the 2014 bid were coming to Cape Town, and we were going to meet them!
For those of you out of the loop, here’s some info from the Cape Town World Design Capital bid website:
This prestigious status is designated biennially by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) to cities that are dedicated to using design for social, cultural and economic development.
We prepared ourselves to perfection! Laurence and I bought new suits, I wove new earrings, we wrote our speech and laid out some of our best beadwork. If I’m honest we were really nervous.
What I loved about their reactions was that they behaved like most new customers. They wanted to touch it, feel it, try it on. Instead of listening seriously to our speech and nodding at appropriate points, they leaped in with questions and ooohs and aaahs!
It was a lovely reminder for me of why I love our product so much. For some reason, beadwork resonates with so many different people. Not in a snooty, fine-wine-tasting kind of a way, but at a level of commonality, the love of it brings people together rather than setting them apart from one another.
Below is the script of what we said. If we have to sum ourselves up in three minutes, this is it:
Beloved Beadwork is a small business founded in 2009, based at Montebello Design Centre. Beloved Beadwork has a staff team of fourteen talented artists from a variety of backgrounds, who work together to produce a collection of high-end jewellery. Around half of Beloved’s work is exported.
The driving purpose of Beloved’s work is to explore and attempt to answer three questions:
How can our company push the medium of beadweaving to it’s fullest potential, in order to both produce beautiful products, and to contribute to the strong tradition of beadweaving in South Africa?
How can we use beadwork to illustrate complex mathematical concepts, including the interplay between mathematics and natural form?
And
What would a socially transformed, ethically minded, Black Conscious, feminist, arts-based business look like, and can we achieve it?
Of course our business is very young, so we are only beginning to explore these questions. But we are having a lot of fun doing so. We have created thousands of items of jewellery which are treasured by their wearers. We have made giant commissioned works of art from kilos of 5mm beads which have exhibited in Miami and Paris. We have exhibited our own work at the National Gallery, accessorised a clothing collection at South African Fashion Week, and exhibited at Design Indaba. Increasingly we are enjoying academic collaborations with collegues from both UCT and universities further afield.
In the coming years we hope to grow as a strong, design-focused, socially transformed business.
—
We find out in October if we have won. Fingers crossed!
All photographs by Bruce Sutherland from the City of Cape Town
This is a difficult post to write. It is one that has been brewing in my mind for some time. It’s intention is not to level criticism at anybody or to cause offense. But I feel that there are some difficult questions that need to be asked about the way that black women are represented by the craft industry in South Africa, and even internationally. The central question is this: ‘Are we portraying true pictures of who our black collegues are, or are we painting the picture that outsiders want to see?’.
When Beloved Beadwork began, we had some tough decisions to make. We knew that as black women producing beadwork, and with a white woman as the owner/manager, we would be portrayed as a ‘project’ involved in ‘job creation’ to help ‘disadvantaged women’. In the pages of design magazines we would be treated as a special case, in a feel good section all of our own away from the ‘real’ designers. Did we want people to see us that way? Many of us had been forced to sing from that hymm book for years. But was it who we really were? How long would we be seen that way? And if a white man did the same work, would it be called ‘empowerment’, or would it suddenly become ‘high art’.
What emerged was a strong conviction that we would forge a new path. A concrete list of words was drawn up that we would never use to describe ourselves or one another. Illnesses would not be disclosed, people’s employment histories would not be public knowledge, descriptions of our personal lives would not be dominated by our tragedies or by who our dependents are. And more importantly, we would present ourselves as the norm. Because (with the exception of the strange Brit writing this!) that is exactly what we are, normal. Being a black woman in South Africa is normal, not a special case.
This approach has had it’s pitfalls. At times we have known that our sales figures would be better if we used the buzzwords that people expected; vulnerable, HIV positive, disabled, mothers, job creation. We have shied away from publicity, fearing we would be typecast in such a way. We have come across as argumentative or rude because we don’t conform to people’s expectations. We’ve refused to participate in videos or photographs where black ‘crafters’ are patted on the head and called a ‘good girl’ by a white ‘designer’. When people walk into our studio and say how nice it is that I am teaching ‘them’, when people greet us grown women as ‘girls’ or ‘mamas’ or ‘Anna’s ladies’, it hurts that little bit more because we have acknowledged that it hurts. And we’ve missed out on much needed funding for fear of damaging our pride and image.
But the benefits have been wonderful. We take enormous pride in our work, and when it sells we know that it does so because it is good, not because we are selling part of our pride with it. We feel that our work is better for it. When we meet together, we can share the truths of our lives without fear that it will be fodder for publicity. After two years, Laurence and I have finally learnt the body language we need in order to show that she is in charge of the shop, not me. And finally, now, we feel able to start talking about our decision.
So let me set the record straight. We are a team of fourteen individuals. No two people in our staff team are alike. Each member of my staff is employed because she is good at what she does, and because she has something to offer the company. We face lots of individual battles. Some of them define us at times. Other battles, whilst perceived as huge by the outside world, we take in our stride. We face the same difficulties and joys faced by women all over the world, rich and poor. We argue, we have widely divergent views of the world we live in. Some of us have lots of kids, others have none. Some of us have strict, purist Christian ideas of the world, others take a synchrotist approach to faith, others are ambivalent about the idea of God. Some of us are married, some divorced, some single. We are not part of a single ‘community’ but come from a variety of backgrounds and communities. Some of us are right wing, some of us left, but all of us have opinions. Some of us have post-graduate diplomas, others completed our education at primary school. But most importantly, few of our team are quiet, deferent, sweet women who have a naive view of the world. And most of us believe the South African economy is in need of major, meaningful transformation.
I hope to write on this further. It’s taken me two years to get this far, so bare with me. But I do think it’s time that the Cape Town design sector took a good look at itself, and re-examined the impact that our portrayals of black women have on their identities and on the prospects for our sector’s transformation.
There are many days when I am grateful for life at Beloved Beadwork. But today was particularly lovely. At the train station I was met by Mado and her lovely girls, Precious and Divine. If ever those names were deserved they are in this case. At work already, because she likes to walk when it’s sunny, was Francine and her son Danny. Danny was delighted to see Precious and they started playing straight away.
We’ve had a brief break in work because it’s winter and very quiet (we hope this’ll be the last winter we take a break), and today most of our team came back to collect beads. We were joined by Nambitha, Vero, Pascasie, Pitshouna, and Therese. We shared news and thoughts and happinesses. Despite the fact that I had to work with 3 children running round my feet, or perhaps because of that, it was joyous chaos! After that we had a lovely email from our intern who is arriving this weekend, great news about consignment sales at the lovely Imagenius, and a nice email from our favourite Norwegians at Fairplay.
Here is a small video I took at the beginning of the day.
In the last in the series of videos made whilst putting our pieces together for the Bluecoat Exhibition, we’ve finished the 20-sided shape. I’m very happy with it!
I’ve made a close-up video too!
Constance and I are finally developing a coral necklace today. Worry not, I shall video it the moment it is finished!
We’ve added another two videos to our YouTube Channel.
Here I am showing off about our backyard mountain!
And here is a video Laurence and I shot at work two weeks ago. It’s a chance to see our lovely studio and shop, and an update of our exciting geometry project.
Hello Beloved friends! We have launched our own youtube channel! Some of the items we are making are so visually complex that they need to be captured on video rather than photograph. We’re really excited about the experimental shapes we’re discovering at the moment.
I’ll post all new videos here. Watch this space, there will be another this afternoon!
We are super, super excited to announce our first formal series of classes at Beloved Beadwork. Please visit the classes page for more information. These are ideal classes for people who wish to become accomplished, creative beaders.
My mother summed things up quite succinctly recently: ‘I just can’t believe my feminist, academic daughter is making jewellery for models to wear at Fashion Week!’. To be honest, neither can I. But here’s the thing, Cape Town, and indeed South Africa, is a place swimming in such creativity, vitality, contrast and beauty, that if there is a creative bone in your body, it will come to the fore when you live here. So here’s my tip, if you’re not sure whether or not you want to work in the creative field, come to Cape Town, it’s a pretty good litmus test. Perhaps that’s why Cape Town has been nominated to be World Design Capital in 2014. I really hope we get it.
Floating my boat at the moment is Nomfusi’s gorgeous sound and visual aesthetic. Here she is:
And here’s her SAMA nominated video:
I’m off to the Easter Market at the Freeworld Design Centre tomorrow. See some of you there?! Happy weekend.
Ok, so I didn’t say anything because I was really nervous. This was such a big deal. But we pulled it off, so now I’m going to shout from the rooftops.
Its funny how the things that visually influence you as an artist change over time. Increasingly music, in particular music videos and live music performances, are the thing that I look to. This video, that I found via myweku is just so utterly glorious.
What I’m starting to understand, especially with the help of Dr Lesley Green, is how alternative geometries and mathematics can be an innately understood and enacted practice, rather than an explicit, studied, intentional understanding. There is a sense of rhythm and movement which starts within and finds expression in the patterns, shapes and textures of our beadwork. Music and the imagery around music often helps to bring that out.
Anyway, enough of my blethering! Enjoy the video :-)
Beadwork is awesome. It’s also a little repetitive at times, but in a cool, rhythmic, hypnotic kind of a way. One of the most enjoyable things about it is being able to work whilst listening to interesting radio, good music and watching dvds and music videos. (When I say watch, I mean mostly listening, but looking up for the good bits!) Yesterday we discovered, via Africa is a County, this great new video filmed in Lagos by Siji for his popular song ‘Ijo’.
Laurence pointed out that it’s hard to place where it is filmed when watching for the first time, the dance moves wouldn’t look completely out of place in South Africa. ‘But then I guess that’s what we have in common across Africa’, she said, ‘we know how to move our hips’!
We’re beading up a storm at the moment for an exciting project to be announced shortly! I can’t wait to tell you…
It’s Jazz Fest in Cape Town this weekend (free concert tonight in Green Market Square 5pm, walala wasala! (you snooze you lose)). And I am very excited to announce that Beloved Beadwork will be there! We’ll have a stand in the vendor’s section, so come find us. You will get a sneak preview of our new Thandiswa-inspired ring. (You can get a preview now if you make friends with us on Facebook!)
We’re very lucky to have so many beautiful children around us every day at Beloved Beadwork. One of those children is Esther, Laurence’s daughter, who comes here every day. (Laurence is shop manager here.) Esther recently learnt to stand up in her cot all on her own. The above photograph is the moment where she did so for the first time.
Yesterday we were also very excited to meet baby Danny, beloved first-born of Estella, who is a beadworker known for her skills in creating hyperbolic planes. He is four months, hard work and gorgeous.
My own recent arrival is a watch! I finally finished the design that came to me whilst watching Thandiswa Mazwai dancing on stage recently.
And last but by no means least, I’m very excited to learn that ZAM magazine is soon to be published in English too! I hope we’re in it one day :-) Watch the video below to learn more.
I have been deeply saddened by recent comments made by Jimmy Manyi, a government spokesperson amongst other powerful positions, about ‘Cape Coloured’ people. Apart from what was said, the language used was so inhumane. How can one talk of an ‘oversupply’ when talking about people?
At work the politics of race, language, class and degradation are never far from our day-to-day discussions. For many of my team who hail from other African countries, and for myself as a British immigrant, the ‘Cape Coloured’ community has offered a most beautiful welcome and acceptance. It saddens all of us to hear of Manyi’s comments.
I am reminded at times like this of Mbeki’s magnificent ‘I am an African’ speech. Particularly this section:
“I owe my being to the Khoi and the San whose desolate souls haunt the great expanses of the beautiful Cape - they who fell victim to the most merciless genocide our native land has ever seen, they who were the first to lose their lives in the struggle to defend our freedom and dependence and they who, as a people, perished in the result.
Today, as a country, we keep an audible silence about these ancestors of the generations that live, fearful to admit the horror of a former deed, seeking to obliterate from our memories a cruel occurrence which, in its remembering, should teach us not and never to be inhuman again.
I am formed of the migrants who left Europe to find a new home on our native land. Whatever their own actions, they remain still, part of me.
In my veins courses the blood of the Malay slaves who came from the East. Their proud dignity informs my bearing, their culture a part of my essence. The stripes they bore on their bodies from the lash of the slave master are a reminder embossed on my consciousness of what should not be done.
I am the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led, the patriots that Cetshwayo and Mphephu took to battle, the soldiers Moshoeshoe and Ngungunyane taught never to dishonour the cause of freedom.
My mind and my knowledge of myself is formed by the victories that are the jewels in our African crown, the victories we earned from Isandhlwana to Khartoum, as Ethiopians and as the Ashanti of Ghana, as the Berbers of the desert.
I am the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas, who sees in the mind’s eye and suffers the suffering of a simple peasant folk, death, concentration camps, destroyed homesteads, a dream in ruins.
I am the child of Nongqause. I am he who made it possible to trade in the world markets in diamonds, in gold, in the same food for which my stomach yearns.
I come of those who were transported from India and China, whose being resided in the fact, solely, that they were able to provide physical labour, who taught me that we could both be at home and be foreign, who taught me that human existence itself demanded that freedom was a necessary condition for that human existence.
Being part of all these people, and in the knowledge that none dare contest that assertion, I shall claim that - I am an African.”
A shortened version of the speech.
I am also consoled by the words of activist Jay Naidoo who said: “Non-racialism is only dead the day we all agree to allow ourselves to be defined as racists and act as racists, and we have not done that.”
A link to Mbeki’s speech can be found here and to the article discussing Jay Naidoo’s comments here
We try to run our own little company in the spirit of non-racialism. That does not mean that we do not discuss, debate, assert and contest. But it does mean that we try to at all times recognise the inherent humanity and dignity in one another. I hope we can do that.
Hello there. Welcome to post-Design Indaba Beloved Beadwork. Phew! Thessa and Chantal of The Fringe Arts did an incredible job representing us and many other Cape-based artists at this year’s expo. It was a fantastic weekend, punctuated by the lovely day of dialogue at the South African National Gallery on Saturday. A very special part of that day was meeting the gorgeous and vivacious Palesa Mokubung of Mantsho Brutally Black Couture. Wow, what a woman! You can find some of her work photographed here. And here is an example of her work:
Just brilliant.
Another discovery this weekend which has made me very happy has been this newly released video by Oskido:
I’m so excited by it that I included it in my own talk about what inspires me in South African Visual and Material Culture (the short version of which is “Everything.”, ie pretty much everything in SA visual culture makes me absurdly happy!). I also spoke about an exciting movement away from European dominated narratives around Africa.
That’s what I’d like to speak about today. Lots of people are quite surprised when they read about our business that we don’t use words that they have come to associate with beadwork made in Africa, such as ‘community project’ or ‘upliftment’. This is actually a conscious effort on our part to defy expectations and bring you a different and less stereotyped understanding of who we are.
You see, we are a team of fantastic, competent, intelligent women from a vast array of backgrounds. Over time I hope you will be able to get to know us better. In the mean time, if you’d like to know more about looking at South Africa, and indeed Africa,in a different way, I cannot recommend highly enough Africa is a Country, a sometimes satirical (hence the name), other times fun, other times very serious blog about contemporary goings on on this wonderful continent. But to give you a short introduction about how why like to write about our business a little differently, this video of an article by Binyavanga Wainaina will give you a pretty good idea:
Oh so exciting! I’ve been invited to speak at the South African National Gallery’s dialogue on Saturday 26th February. My topic - what about South African visual culture inspires me as a designer. Wooo! So much fun. Here is the official invite. For those of you planning to make a weekend of it in town, with Design Indaba and all that goes with it, this would be a lovely thing to totter up the road for.
Did I mention? We have four very special pieces in the Imagining Beauty exhibition. Photos to follow.
Hello and welcome to the new Beloved Beadwork blog! Check in here for the latest news and views about our lovely little business.
In the mean time, here’s a photo I took today. E has an abundance of gorgeous fabrics. We couldn’t quite figure out what this one depicted (tubes of paints maybe? Or skipping ropes?) but she looked lovely nevertheless. E is one of my favourite people in the world, and has been incredible in the personal support she’s shown me over the years. She has two nursing diplomas (she should be practising, but thanks to SAQA’s backwards attitude to the rest of Africa she can’t), she is endlessly loving to those around her, and she just never stops moving!
