beloved beadwork

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.

(The bid committee are really nice, you should make friends with them on Facebook!)

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.

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We find out in October if we have won. Fingers crossed!

All photographs by Bruce Sutherland from the City of Cape Town