by Lynda Mc Daniel
Photos by Ralph Gabriner unless otherwise noted

Brooch, 1997, 3 1/2" x 1/2". Contemporary glass beads, sterling silver.

Valerie Hector's small, still voice within was neither small nor still during her graduate studies at the University of Chicago during the early 1980s. Knowing that beadwork, rather than a Ph.D. in anthropology, was her destiny, a small voice kept making a ruckus in the library no matter how hard she tried to shush it. “I knew it was a bad sign when I'd put in my required 10 hours a day in the library, but I was often in the stacks looking up beadwork. That was not what I was supposed to be doing. Of course,” Hector adds with a chuckle, “I did develop an excellent beadwork bibliography that way.”

Cuff bracelet, 1998. 2 3/4" x 3". Contemporary glass beads, sterling silver.

Although she officially traded in anthropology in 1985 to pursue jewelry making and beadwork, she never really gave up her interest in other cultures. Now, instead of sneaking a peak at beadwork books during her anthropological studies, beads inspire her studies of people and their cultures, especially Asian nations, such as Borneo and Sumatra, China and India. Hector's voice takes on a soft reverence as she describes her collection of beaded panels from the Dayak peoples of Borneo, featuring talismanic motifs believed to protect children's souls from harm.

Necklace of Polygon Weave, 1998. 60" x 1/3". Contemporary glass beads, sterling silver. Detail shown below

“I see them as acts of devotion or faith in something larger,” Hector says. “They represent a religious impulse, a prayer to the guardian deities to protect this new life. I am attracted to them, too, because they are for the most part the work of women, anonymous and unrecognized, who have created incredibly beautiful things. I do wonder, though, why they want to bother with beadwork. It is so difficult to connect those hundreds of thousands of beads to create dragons. Why do they do that? They have to be highly motivated and believe that they are powerful, that they can create a prayer that the gods will hear and answer. Some of them believe that without this, the child literally will die. It brings up questions about human nature that I can't answer, and that interests me, too. It makes me very happy to try to piece together a whole out of all of these parts, to understand the traditions and see the scope of human effort in this area.”

Hmmm. Sounds like an anthropologist to me. There's no question that beadwork is the focus of Hector's life, but the work seems strongly influenced by something much deeper. So much so, it makes me wonder what we would discover if the tables were turned. What would we learn about this complex and thoughtful artist if an anthropologist from, say, Borneo, came to America to study her?

OBJECT OF STUDY.

Detail of necklace, above.

Our anthropologist, let's call her Buah from the Kenyah peoples of Borneo, first flies into Chicago's O'Hare airport, then travels to the suburb of Evanston, where she finds a 5-foot-10-inch-tall, blond-haired, 39-year-old subject who, for the past 12 years, has dedicated her life to creating intricately beaded jewelry and wall pieces. Buah writes in her journal that the subject begins each day with strong coffee and repetitious movements on something called “StairMaster.” (Note in margin: “Curious contraption. Does this small staircase symbolize walking up temple steps? Must ask.”) Inside the sunny and spacious 800-square-foot studio, she notes that the native bead artist likes to work in a slightly messy environment, presumably to pay homage to the bead Muses, and prefers to work surrounded by trees. Buah later traces those trees, especially the winter ones with their graceful shapes exposed, to some of the artist's most fascinating work.

One such piece is Ship of Transition. “Everyone was asking me why I was spending days and weeks on it,” Hector recalls. “I had no other explanation other than, 'I have to do this.'” The inspiration for the title comes from Indonesia, specifically Sumatra, not far from Borneo.

As a break from production jewelry, Hector started creating beaded wall pieces. The pieces, inspired by Chinese embroidered screen panels, Asian beaded textiles, and Tibetan Buddhist mandalas, revitalized her energies, bringing a fresh vitality to her jewelry making. This wall piece, At the Still Point V, was created using the peyote stich, ladder stitch, quadruple helix, polygon weave, right angle weave, and embroidery. Photo: Eileen Ryan.

“There is a tradition in beadwork and textiles on the island of Sumatra,” Hector explains, “where ships of transition are important symbols depicted on clothing worn at ceremonies and rituals of transition, such as marriage or death. For me, that piece felt like a ship and also like a tree, a blossoming force, traveling away from the past at that time.”

First presented in September of last year, these works represent a new direction for Hector, compliments of the bead Muses who did, indeed, visit her studio. “A few years ago, I noticed how beautiful all the tiny pieces of beadwork lying around the studio looked as they spilled out on the desk, how they fell together in beautiful patterns. I wanted to capture that in my jewelry. I kept trying and trying, but I couldn't make them come together.” Then, one day, the answer came in a sudden burst of inspiration. “I created a metal armature with bars to support the pieces of beadwork. I turned the 1/4-inch squares into tubes by stitching the seam, which makes them easier to support and allows the piece to become a more coherent structure. I saw how they could be durable and colorful, unusual yet consistent with my style.

“Many of the pieces I design are very functional, designed with feedback from my customers. They're constantly telling me what they'd like to see, and I am constantly trying to give them that in a way that pleases me. I have found that they don't want me to go too far off the deep end with my designs - they want to be able to look at something and see that it is a Valerie Hector. That took me a while to understand, and now that I do, I am happy with it.” Though Hector prefers making one-of-a-kind pieces, she also produces an impressive and varied line of production jewelry that includes beaded earrings, necklaces, pins, bracelets, and an occasional beaded collar.

Necklaces of Hector's patented Beaded Beads, 1995. Hector creates the tiny, painstaking beads (an average bead measures 1/2") of antique glass beads, wood and resin.

THOSE INTUITIVE TUGS keep life interesting, and Hector says she has begun to pay more attention to them. Honoring calls from the Muses, though, also means accepting a certain amount of uncertainty between messages. In the same way that both notes and intervals of silence are needed to make music sonorous, both the stimulation of inspiration and the quietude of inactivity are vital to the creative process.

“Everything has its time. I try to let things take their own course,” Hector explains. “When I try to force things, I'm usually not very successful. I tend to leave things until they are ready. The tiny bits of beadwork sat around for years until I could understand how to make them come together, though I suppose that something was working inside of me all along.”

Hector is self-taught in the grandest way -- through world travel to such exotic destinations as Egypt, China, and, of course, Borneo, as well as through the study of beadwork at some of the world's finest museums. She has received permission to study behind-the-scenes at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in Leiden, and the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, two museums with fine collections of Indonesian beadwork reflective of the colonial Dutch presence in Indonesia. Other study sites include the Field Museum in Chicago, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C.

Hector is also an avid collector of beadwork from other cultures; among her prized pieces are a panel from a baby carrier from the Dayak peoples of Borneo. 20th century (above) photo: Eileen Ryan.

What anthropological field report would be complete without a listing of the subject's preferred techniques? Some favorites include universally popular methods such as peyote and ladder stitches. Hector also incorporates modern bead-weaving techniques such as Ndeble herringbone, quadruple helix, and polygon weave, which she believes orginated within the last century in South Africa. Until recent Western publications, these three techniques were largely unknown outside that country.

“I'm interested in using techniques that have not been used too much by American beadworkers,” Hector says. “I like to study the techniques of other cultures as well as those from our culture's past, learning and understanding how they work and then sharing them with other people. We need to keep challenging ourselves to discover other techniques — where they came from, who used them, what was made with them — and then do our own thing with them.

I would like to know what the ancient Egyptians would think of what we are doing today, our raw experimenting, going beyond what's been done. It's curious that this huge movement of beadwork that has arisen in the past 10 years seems to be isolated to this country and in Europe somewhat. When I started, there really wasn't much going on. There certainly weren't so many publications dedicated to beadwork, and there were vastly fewer books than there are now. Everything is blossoming.”

A vest of bamboo beads from late 19th-century China, from the collection of Valerie Hector; photo: Eileen Ryan.

ZIG-ZAGS. The shortest distance between two points may be a straight line, but life never seems to pay much attention to that sort of thing. Besides, it's the zig-zags that make life rich and interesting. Consider what happened a couple of years ago when Hector wanted to escape the tedium of production jewelry by creating beaded wall pieces. Not being one to rush the creative process, it took her a year and a half before she understood how the wall pieces should go together. Again, the Muses dropped in.

“One day last summer I was in Chicago near a gallery that I'd never been to before,” Hector recalls. “I was getting ready to move to Evanston, and I thought, before I leave this city, I've got to go in. It is devoted to Asian art, and as I walked in, I spotted this series of screens - four giant Chinese embroidered screens from the late 19th century. Even though they were so meticulous, they weren't static. They were beautiful and full of interest. Standing before them, I suddenly understood how I wanted my series of wall pieces to go. After that, everything just fell into place. It took more than a year of randomly creating small beaded textiles and jewellike elements in various shapes and sizes before I began to assemble them into a series of six vertically oriented panels. For inspiration, I looked not only to the Chinese embroidered screen panels, but also to Asian beaded textiles and the mandala, the multicolored, intricately structured designs that Tibetan Buddhist monks fashion with great care to facilitate meditation and transcend everyday life. In so doing, I hoped to appropriate aspects of all of these traditions.”

The inspiration for this Ship of Transition necklace comes from Sumatra, where ships are depicted on clothing worn at ceremonies and rituals of transition, such as marriage or death, 1995. 9" diameter x 3/4". Antique glass beads, sterling silver, 18K white gold, wood, silk.

As things turned out, Hector's wall pieces were more like an 18-month vacation than a new vocation, somewhere to rest and revitalize her talents and energies. She thought she was consciously breaking away from jewelry and from the past, using more beads and techniques to do something radically different. By the time she was done, she found that, like it or not, she was still very much a jeweler.

“I started out to make something more textilelike, but I found that I was approaching the wall pieces as a jeweler might. As a result, they brought a fresh vitality to my jewelry making. It was a dialectic I have experienced before, one about using the past to go forward and at the same time getting pulled back toward the past. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect to return to jewelry, but I now have this renewed interest to keep pushing forward through my new work.”

Another offshoot of the wall pieces is a line of jewelry in which the small pieces of beadwork are set in bezels. The beadwork captures the essences of the Chinese characters, a regular motif in the wall pieces. “I am fascinated with script rendered in beadwork,” Hector explains. “It just seems so strange, so other, because a lot of times the script is not well rendered. It can't be. The beads go one way, and the letters go another. I was interested in creating little ideograms in the pieces that would contain messages in their own right, but ones that are very difficult to decipher because they were not true ideograms but, rather, creative variations.”

Valerie Hector. Photo: Nelda Wayne

In other aspects of Hector's life, Buah finds someone not unlike herself - one who has a deep connection to home, prepares savory meals at home, regularly visits with parents and brothers and sisters, and dotes on her 14-year-old Samoyed, Snowball. Buah also finds a community of four women who work in their homes yet enjoy the security of the payroll and benefits that Hector provides them in exchange for their help with her bead business. Three faithful employees have stayed with her for seven to 10 years, and one joined the group last year.

For Hector, beads aren't self-contained, but are perfectly appropriate to combine with precious metals. Brooch, 1995, of antique glass beads, sterling silver, 18K white gold, and wood.

“Subject leads a seasonally nomadic life,” one journal entry might note. Between retail craft shows across the country and a busy lecture and teaching schedule, Hector spends the equivalent of three months away from home. Too much time, says the admitted homebody. “A few years ago I stopped selling to stores and decided to focus on selling directly to customers,” Hector says. “I don't have the income from stores to count on, but, on the other hand, I don't have the worries and aggravation, either. I am happier in many ways, but I find it hard to travel so much. But I do enjoy traveling to such interesting cities - Baltimore, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco - so there is a certain amount of sight-seeing and museum visits, eating out and having fun.”

Buah has completed her research in America and is heading back to Borneo to file her report. On the long flight home, she jots observations in her journal while they are still fresh in her mind. “Subject tells me she is the happiest with her life right now, that her life has come so far, brought her to understand so many more things. She has found ways to make her business work and keep herself invigorated and challenged. Although she is first and foremost a bead artist, she continues to research and collect from other cultures (with astonishingly good taste in Asian beaded textiles!). I was touched yesterday when she told me how grateful she is to have this life, how incredibly lucky she feels. I didn't know Americans could appreciate their good fortunes! But I believe this one listens deep within herself, connected to her inner life and her Muses. She seems most sincere in her dedication and has proven an honest and worthy subject for our study.”

Valerie Hector may be contacted through her Web site at www.valeriehector.com or by calling (847) 328-1585.