I have been working on this small bowl as my first try at a properly beaded bowl, using Huichol techniques and style. This time I brushed on melted beeswax, which gives a more even layer of wax, and I embedded the beads, hole-side up, as the Mexican Huichol people do when making beaded bowls. I used 8/0 size seed beads, but not silver lined cylinders as I tried to use last time. It is not easy, I can tell you that much, just to fit the beads on and make a consistent pattern. As I am definitely not a planner, this may be a serious drawback. But we will see. So far, this is how far along I am, after several hours of work on a an approximately 6” diameter bowl. I also need more colors in the beads I am using! Yes!
Below are examples of the exquisite work the Huichol people do.
Phoebe Sparrow Wagner, formerly Pamela Spiro Wagner, is an award-winning poet, author and artist who wrote WE MAD CLIMB SHAKY LADDERS (Cavankerry Press, 2009) poems about her life with schizophrenia, and co-author, with her sister, a psychiatrist, of DIVIDED MINDS: TWIN SISTERS AND THEIR JOURNEY THROUGH SCHkIZOPHRENIA, a memoir, which was a finalist for the Connecticut Book Award and won the NAMI Outstanding Literature Award in 2006. It is still in print, and available at Amazon.Wagner second book, a first volume of poetry, is WE MAD CLIMB SHAKY LADDERS, (2009) which is available at a discount now from Cavankerrypress.org. Her newest book of poetry and art, LEARNING TO SEE IN THREE DIMENSIONS (Green Writers Press/Sundog Poetry Center 2017) is also now available at Amazon and other booksellers.
Her work has been published in Tikkun, Midwest Poetry Review, and the New York TImes Sunday Magazine as well as the Hartford Courant and the LA Weekly, among other places. She also won an international poetry competition sponsored by the BBC in 2001/2.
Wagner’s art was on display in Connecticut area libraries in 2011 and 2012 and in Vermont, in Brattleboro, in 2016 and 2017. Many pieces are available for sale and charitable donation. She currently lives in Vermont.
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Below are examples of the exquisite work the Huichol people do.
