I made the first set of bugs just for me after a long meandering daydream about entomology and lepidoptery…about beauty and life and memory. I thought making my own boxed frame of iridescent creatures would be a perfect way to honour the trinkets I had been given and the people they had come from without having to look at a big useless box of broken jewellery. Then there was some left…so I made some more…then there was less left so I bought some beaded jewellery from a charity shop and someone else’s story was added to the mix…then another…and another.
Now all the bits have been mixed together in my bead box and I don’t know who’s story I am making my little bugs out of but that doesn’t matter anymore. I love the thought of all these people’s lives mixing together. The places the beads have been, the celebrations they have seen, tiny fragments of memories stitched together to make something more precious than the sum of its parts.