Laura Honse – Art Jewelry Trunk Show

Laura Honse
Art Jewelry Trunk Show
Saturday, December 15, 5-8pm
La Tienda, Umaran 19
free

Making paper beads is a traditional craft that gained popularity in Victorian England when women would gather socially in their parlors while making paper beads from scraps of wallpaper rolled on knitting needles. These were then polished with bees wax, strung on yarn and used as door curtains to divide rooms. This practice was revived in the 1920s and 30s for paper bead jewelry and paper beads made a comeback with the hippies in the 60s. More recently, paper bead making has been introduced to African countries such as Uganda as part of development projects in cooperatives in order to make a move away from charitable aid towards business enterprises that provide sustainable income. Paper bead making is now a flourishing hobby world wide.

Laura Honse, an American visual artist, stumbled per chance upon paper bead making just a few months ago and has since immersed herself in discovering the endless possibilities of this media. She uses a wide variety of papers ranging from vintage books, sheet music, hand made Japanese paper, magazines, marble and decorative papers and has even recycled decorative packaging tape that arrived wrapped on a post parcel. But her preference is for paper she hand paints, which has much more texture and intensity of color. For some beads, tubular in shape, she even paints a miniature abstract painting 1 inch x 1 inch. Although most of the image gets covered up once it is rolled, she enjoys the process and the element of chance in the final income. Some beads are hand painted with stripes horizontally or vertically. Others are muted colored backgrounds covered with splatters and resemble marble or stone.

Paper beads can be made in a variety of shapes: cones, spheres, cylinders, teardrops, torus or rhombus. Sometimes Laura combines different shapes in one bead such as a cylinder mounted by a sphere. Or reworks a cylinder by adding sculpted tissue paper to the middle. She combines commercial paper with her hand painted paper, or paints over printed paper. Some paper beads get adorned with yarn, ribbon, string or twine. Rather than highly varnish them, she uses a light matt varnish or leaves them as is. She likes to stress the beauty and fragility of paper and to keep the focus on the paper alone, stringing the beads on soft leather to avoid the use of metal and to keep them lightweight, as paper should be.

Laura’s necklaces are created in a variety of styles ranging from colorful tribal looking, Middle Eastern or Asian, to a contemporary funky pop-art look with beads containing striking text or handwriting accentuated by day glow color accents. Whimsical, intricate, delicate and definitely one of a kind, this work is sure to make an impression regardless if one loves jewelry or not for it is art jewelry: emphasizing creative expression as the most important quality of the work. This is just the beginning, and the artists looks forward to experimenting with many more different paper bead techniques and paper possibilities!

Please join us and the artist Laura Honse at La Tienda on Saturday, December 15 for a glass of wine and a delightful event which will include other amazing artists and works.