I really liked how my fabric beetle looked with beads sewn on, and my suspended clay figures worked well too - so I decided to combine these ideas by pressing beads into another set of clay beetles. My clay had started drying out so I had to work quite quickly, but some of them still look cracked because of this. It also meant that the beads can fall out quite easily, but I have reattached them with superglue.
In some of them, I used beads and sequins of different shapes and sizes but keeping to shades one colour, while in others I put a variety of different colours. I really like how the monotone ones look because each bead has a different effect even though they are roughly the same colour - some are transparent, some iridescent, some metallic etc.. It also reminded me of work by Liz West who filled a trolley with various blue items. If I made the beetle on a larger scale I could put a greater variety of objects into it, like brooches, small toys, and any other little things I can find of the same colour. This would give a sense of the everyday, and how we like to collect things that make us comfortable. A personal example is that I like collecting broken bits of pottery that I find with patterns on them, so I could even incorporate those into my work.
For one of them, I used large children's beads which make me feel quite nostalgic, and I chose some of my favourite colours, again referring to the idea of comfort. I think their chunkiness looks odd next to other ones which have smaller, more delicate shapes on them, so it has quite a basic appearance that doesn't look like much effort has been put into it.
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As a quick experiment, and for fun, I grabbed some wire and created a simplified outline of the stag beetle's body parts. Initially I was going to join them together but I knocked the table and they all became jumbled into what looked like a really interesting abstract drawing, and I decided to photograph this and then make more variations by dropping the parts on the table and seeing where they fell. As humans, we like to make sense of what we see by connecting the dots or joining the lines - and this brings us comfort. When I look at the images of the scrambled parts I try to imagine a picture, but it's really difficult to decipher anything other than random shapes and lines so it makes me feel quite uncomfortable and lost.
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