Karen Beningfield and Sarah Toussaint
The Poppy Cycle is a piece designed by Karen Beningfield using a
Contemporary Geometric Beadwork technique of Geometric Capture.
These pieces are created by adding coloured caps to small geometric
HyperLoops (created with a stepped increase cycle) and then
attaching the resulting barbell-like sets of flowers created into a
turning cycle by hinging the edges of the flower caps together at a
twist. This form can be turned and twisted for a variety of
presentations, including one that hides the flower caps entirely.
Sarah Toussaint, an artist on our team who lives in Belgium, is
creating the necklace-sized version of the bangle, with huge flower
caps. The inspiration for this piece was a vase of flowers; Karen
wanted to capture the way that they moved together as well as their
sharp, clear colours.
This overdress is proposed to be worn over a simple sheath, and uses
one of our Live Lines techniques to create a series of long, curling
Casting Spines that will have many hundreds of tiny flowers, bees,
butterflies and dragonflies attached to it. The beauty of this piece
is twofold; both the exquisite look of the Spines and tiny elements,
and the fact that hundreds of people from all over the world stand
ready to create it for the Linz show. The technique of the Casting
Spine is new to our team. We have long been looking for the
simplest, cleanest and easiest to use topological edge for casting,
but never considered a single line of beads, as there is no such
stable form. In peyote stitch, which is how most of our
architectural work is created, the smallest possible stable line is
three strips of sewn work. This is not a useful line for birthing
new work. The Casting Spine was innovated by Joy Davidson (one of
our team researchers) in 2018. By adding one more line of beads
stitched to the middle row of the three rows the Casting Spine is
created - an energized form with three lines of beads ready to hold
new peyote beadwork.