|
Maze Series Beads I have always been a bit of a nut for puzzles, mazes, and the like. The fascination came from my grandfather; when I was a child, he kept a large collection of 3-D puzzles and mazes. The entire collection was housed in a cabinet, and us grandkids were allowed- and encouraged- to play with anything in the cabinet. However, there was a catch… If we picked up a puzzle, we couldn’t put it down until it was solved… I vividly remember sitting through a family dinner frantically trying to finish a 3-D ball bearing maze, with my grandfather chuckling something about biting off more than I could chew… of course, being the bull-headed little kid that I was (and still am), finishing that maze became an act of defiance. It’s no surprise that mazes resurfaced in my bead work. At the start of 2005, I made a few full solvable maze beads using stringer to outline the walls of each maze. Using stringer to create the maze in large part limited its complexity, and I hoped to find a way to make the mazes more difficult to solve. Shortly after, I took my second class with Bronwen Heilman, from whom I learned how to use vitreous enamel paints. All of the mazes in this gallery are made using vitreous enamels. Each bead is made in the flame, annealed, and cooled. I then paint the maze, which in some cases, can take hours. Once the paint has dried, the bead is reintroduced into the flame to adhere the paint with the surface of the bead. Like the puzzles in my grandfather’s cabinet, developing these maze beads became a conquest. So, in many ways, these are a friendly nod to my grandfather.
|
