bead bedlam

You know what's frustrating? When you're doing beadwork and those pesky little beads jump out of your tweezers and fall onto the floor, never to be found again.

Bead-artist extraordinaire Liza Lou doesn't have that problem. Why? Because the floor is also made of beads. Oh, and so are the walls, counters, and everything on them.

Liza Lou is an Los Angeles-based artist who's first UK show is now on at the White Cube gallery, evoking mixed reactions from gallery-goers.

In the past, Liza Lou has created life-size kitchen and backyard made entirely out of beads - all surfaces covered with tiny glass beads that are painstakingly applied, one at a time, with tweezers. Now she's focusing on symbols of confinement, recreated in monochromatic beads. From the show's invitation:

Security Fence (2005) is a large scale cage made up of four steel, chain link walls, topped by rings of barbed wire and Cell (2004-2006), as its name suggests, is a room based on the approximate dimensions of a death row prison cell, a kind of externalized map of the prisoner’s mind. [...] For the execution of Cell, Lou further slowed down the process by using beads of the smallest variety with their holes all facing up in an exacting hour-by-hour approach in order to ‘use time as an art material’.

You can see photos of her earlier work here and read a review of her new show here.

[via The Guardian's Culture Vulture blog]