Sullivan Seed Beads

Teresa Sullivan can make seed beads laugh, cry, dance, and defy gravity. Drawing from influences as diverse as William S Burroughs, African art, and Kustom Kar Kulture, Sullivan meticulously stitches tiny breads together to create flat tapestries and freestanding, 3-dimensional forms. All of her work is made with thread and beads alone, there are no armatures anywhere, and even no glue.

The Portland, Ore., artist began with beaded jewelry, but had creative epiphany in 1994 when a friend loaned her a pair of seed beaded portrait earrings made by Baltimore, Md., bead artist Joyce Scott.

“When I saw what graphic power these earrings had, I became really excited about this medium,” says Sullivan. “I realized that beads could become a vehicle for storytelling.”

Sullivan’s beaded stories are often about people discovering their abilities, as in her sculptures of sci-fi influenced heroines. But she also loves telling stories in symbol, as with her Genericity Generosity necklace. It depicts a tale she heard from a friend who gave away a record album to a complete stranger on a whim and later found out that the music had changed the stranger’s life.

Sullivan begins each of her pieces with the germ of a story in mind, but with no specific plan as to how she’ll construct it. Instead, she lets the work evolve, drawing on a variety of seed bead stitches to make some parts of the work flexible and other parts rigid. She enjoys the process of overcoming the structural and aesthetic challenges that present themselves as a piece grows.

Sullivan is also a passionate advocate for anyone who seeks to make art. Tell her you’re interested in learning to bead, and she’s likely to reply. “Dive in. Don’t be afraid of ugly or anything else. Gain inspiration from anything you like: berry picking, trash, highfalutin art, crazy people, your grandma. Your big toe.”