Glass Gardens · Part 1

On Animate Beads, Authorship, Stewardship, and Creative Surrender

Apr 25, 2024

In 2016, I’d just started working part-time as a guitar instructor at a local high school here in Montreal. A certain 8th-grader I’ll call “N” was one of the first students to appear on my roster.

I quite liked N, which isn’t to say that diligence or enthusiasm ranked among his strong suits. His parents, alarmed at their kid’s newfound listlessness, had been the ones to sign him up for lessons. This typically signals to a teacher that they should manage expectations around a new student’s likely gumption levels.

That year, N was steadily getting taller than he was ready to be; he was chronically underslept. He had that studiously jaded demeanor for which only young teenagers can muster the energy.

A first-class space-flake, he also had a strong penchant for colorful imagery and a delightful way with words. His hot takes on various topics and situations were quirky and entertaining. For all of his “minimalist” practicing, he’d regularly lob amazing pearls of insight at me, fresh off the cuff. I eventually let him know he’d been both a student and a teacher. Lessons probably lasted a year.

Eight years on, I still often think back to this one remark he made. One day, while he was idly looking around the room during a lesson, he happened to notice an ordinary, inch-long gash along the edge of a countertop. (Was it a desk? A cabinet door…? I forget.)

“Objects tell a story,” he mused, not quite absent, not fully there.

He probably would’ve yawned, then. I can’t be sure, since I was busy falling out of my chair, my mind blown at his perceptiveness and imagination. Now, I realize this might strike you as little more than cute. If so, I guess “you would’ve had to be there” to witness a brilliant child hurl himself into any number of parallel timelines through a homely-looking crack in the furniture.

It was spectacular.

The neat conceptual inversion encased in N’s statement, wrapped in an elegant bit of poetry, may have foreshadowed a shift in my own internal dialogue around creative practice. More specifically, I’m referring to my playful adoption, in recent years, of the “profoundly irrational” notion that, contrary to basic Western assumptions, material objects are alive, with intention and agency.

While I wouldn’t say that N’s comment was the sole catalyst of this ongoing reflection, I think it may have cemented its own place in my catalogue of stand-out pupil quotes by landing at my feet like a 200-lb. sack of déjà vu.

Recently, I’ve noted that some of the promo materials I currently use include statements like these: “My beadwork is a living exploration of my blended ancestry.” “Finished works come alive in direct response to their surroundings.” “Flintstitch carries its own strange, powerful momentum.” Indeed, I seem to have taken to anthropomorphizing my art materials and projects, or to embracing the notion that my work indeed has a will of its own. It also appears that I’ve got plenty of company (past, present, here and elsewhere) when it comes to this particular framing, which begs to question why, how and where I would have picked up the habit in the first place. I’m curious about this, both from a cultural perspective and as I contemplate its potential benefit to my craft.

Share Matte & Shiny Objects

A few weeks ago, I discovered a Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) artist, MC Snow, who spoke of objects that “carry the past, the present, voices, our spirits.” During a round-table discussion hosted by the McCord Stewart Museum, he stated that his ongoing collaborative work with the museum, whose collection includes ancient and contemporary items made by the Mohawk people, involves “bringing out, bringing forth these objects’ voices,” and having them tell their stories.

Days later, coincidentally, I also learned that the Cree word for “bead,” mîkisis, is grammatically classed as an animate noun, meaning that the alive-ness of beads is constantly referenced in conversation as a matter of course. (If you’re a native Cree speaker, your corrections, clarifications and/or insight are most welcome in the comments.)

You might say this recurring theme was pestering me to look into it… so I did.

From the Wiki article on the Swampy Cree language:

“Swampy Cree does not have gender in the Indo-European sense (masculine, feminine and neuter). Rather, it differentiates between animate and inanimate (see Animacy). While no living things are within the ‘inanimate’ class, there are some nonliving things (socks, kettles, stones, paddles, etc.) within the ‘animate’ class.”

For clarification (quoted from this website, my emphasis):

“Just as the linguistic use of terms like masculine, feminine and neuter in the description of European languages should not be taken too literally, the terms animate and inanimate in use for Cree nouns should be viewed merely as useful names for the two noun classes of Cree. […] [Not] all animate nouns refer to living beings. However, it might be more appropriate to describe the class of animate nouns in Cree as those nouns which are marked as special in one way or another. We could then further suggest that one of the most important factors that will mark something as special is its association with and/or importance to life in general. The animate classification need not then be boiled down to a single concise definition, but can be characterized by a number of different criteria, including: the actual possession of life (as with all living things or ‘animates’ […]), the contribution towards creating life ([e.g.] the reproductive organs), the contribution towards sustaining life in difficult conditions ([e.g.] clothing worn only in winter), and the contribution to spiritual life ([e.g.] the pipe, stone, and feather, among others).”

Despite the above suggestion to regard (as native speakers do) the dichotomy between animate and inanimate nouns as a grammatical idiosyncrasy of the Cree language, and not as a binary distinction to be taken literally, there’s no question that the tiny, humble, donut-shaped pieces of glittering glass that beadworkers spend countless hours organizing into finished pieces do indeed provide various types of sustenance that “contribute to life.”

Admittedly, my interest in said dichotomy is twofold: On one hand, reading between the lines of an unusual turn of phrase can yield profound and fascinating insights, as seen above. On the other, there’s an odd sense of recognition for me in connecting these dots within my beadwork practice, for reasons to do with my own cultural background. I’ll speak to these in more depth in a future post. For now, I’ll say that this animate/living beads idea is intuitive, even familiar, somehow. Contemplating it feels akin to reconnecting with an early childhood best friend for the first time in decades. The familiarity isn’t due to us having stayed in touch, but to her existing as a very old memory in my mind, right next to the unforgettable smell of our kindergarten classroom.

Objects, materials are alive, conscious, and have agency. For an artist having largely trained and worked within European paradigms, this idea—contemplated in a strict, literal sense as a thought experiment and/or loosely adopted as a working theory—changes everything.

If my materials are alive, it only follows that I should claim stewardship of the pieces into which they coalesce, rather than ownership or authorship.

Teasing out the spectacular implications will require its own dedicated post.