About Valerie

 

I was born in 1960 in Evanston, Illinois to two loving and generous parents.  I was the second of their five children. 

When I was 3, I received a very important gift from my parents: my first set of beads—giant, colorful wooden beads—and a red and white striped shoelace to string them on (see below).  Recently my mother found the original brightly-colored tubular container that they came in, labelled “Playskool Jumbo Beads No. 702.”   I keep it on a shelf in my studio.
 
According to my mother, I used to sit and play with my giant Playskool beads for hours on end, stringing them, unstringing them, and stringing them again, in different combinations each time. Wherever I went, I carried the beads with me in a little bag. 

Finally my mother started to wonder if something was wrong with me. Why was I so obsessed with these beads?  Should she call the doctor?  (Fortunately she didn’t. She decided to wait and see.)

My parents always saved everything that their children ever made.  Naturally, this encouraged us and made us feel appreciated.  They also made sure we had plenty of books around the house, so that reading and learning were part of our everyday lives.

Not only did my parents save my first set of beads, or most of them, but they saved my first and only self-portrait (at right)dating to June of 1965, in which I gave myself a large barrel-shaped bead for a torso, and a small round bead for a neck.  I had become one with my beads.  In many ways, I suppose, I still am.

Another defining moment came in the early 1970s, when my parents gave me a modest book, Simply Beads (by Betty J. Weber and Anne Duncan, published in 1971 by Western Trimming Corporation of Culver City, California, with a cover price of $1.50),  which had diagrams of basic beadworking techniques and photos of beadwork from other parts of the world. 

If a book can change a life, I think this one changed mine.  For the first time I understood that a whole world of beadwork was waiting to be explored, that there were many other people just like me, who wanted to work with beads.  And there was a lot to learn.  A new universe beckoned.   Somehow this was exactly the inspiration I needed at that moment, and in the years to follow.

In later years I tried to be other things—an English major, a metal sculptor, an anthropologist—but I always came back to beads. Or more accurately, to beadwork.  I opened my studio on January 1st of 1988, and since then have been equal parts maker and researcher, figuring out how to put beads together, and looking into how other people put beads together.  

In 2005, my own book The Art of Beadwork was published, and it began from much the same premise as Simply Beads: that there is more to this humble medium, this curious stepchild of the textile arts, than we tend to assume.  

What is so compelling about beadwork?  Why have people of so many cultures practiced it, and for so many centuries?  There are many answers.  One is that beadwork satisfies something very basic in human nature, which is to build a coherent whole from a chaotic set of parts. It helps that those parts are, often as not, visually inviting and intellectually interesting, with origins in lands and eras far beyond our own. 

If you are interested in the history of beads, you will want to take a look at Lois Sherr Dubin’s brilliant The History of Beads from 100,000 BC  to the Present,” which was published by Harry N. Abrams, Inc. in the fall of 2009 as an updated and expanded version of a book first published in the 1980s.  

These days, I am sketching out a series of pieces that will express my concerns about some of the troubling events of our era.  If I do manage to bring these pieces into being, it will be a paradigm shift of sorts, a move away from a purely decorative mode, one that feels somewhat overdue. 

And I continue to research mainland Chinese beadwork, with the goal of publishing the results of my research in the next few years.  Nothing makes me happier than working on this project, which is both daunting and fulfilling: trying to piece together clues to the history of beadwork in China, to create a different kind of whole from a set of disparate fragments.

I hope you will enjoy looking through my website.  If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to email me, and I will respond as soon as possible.    My resume follows.    

–Valerie Hector