Adele J. Denton

26/11/2012

Winner Wearable Art - Jersey Textile Showcase 2012. Semiprecious stones, Japanese glass beads, leather. Handstitched.

08/11/2012

Two of my designs can be found in Showcase 500 - Beaded Jewelry, published by LarkCrafts. Some very prominent and talented bead artists included, this is a beautiful and inspiring book. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Showcase-500-Beaded-Jewelry/dp/1454703164

Showcase 500 Beaded Jewelry (500 Series)

03/11/2012

This month's Craft&Design Magazine. A fantastic article showcasing my beadwork on page 12. Many thanks to Angie and Paul Boyer for bringing the art of craft into the spotlight. http://www.craftanddesign.net/magazine/224/

27/04/2011

An experiment in beadweaving. Swarovski crystal in Fire Opal and Olivine. Miyuki seed beads. Tubular and flat pe**te stitch.
The vivid orange and bright greens remind me of old pictures I had seen of Aztec headdresses, which ties in nicely with the sun-like look of the individual components. This one will remain in my possession, but I will upgrade the clasp and replicate the design in other colours to go to the gallery.

21/04/2011

My piece "Queen Lydia" has made it to the final stage of Bead Dreams - an annual competition held in conjunction with the world's biggest bead fair, this year being held in Wisconsin. The final selection is made from hundreds of entries, so it is a great honour, and a real boost to my spirits, for my work to be included.

12/04/2011

My submission for Craft&Design selected gallery has been accepted and can be found at http://www.craftmaker.co.uk/adeledenton/ Am very grateful for their positive response and feedback at this years Jersey Textile Showcase, where I won the Judges Award. A fantastic week, enjoyed by all. There are a lot of talented people on this rock!

Beads and their use in body adornment date back almost as far as human history, and I have always been drawn to the colour and drama that beadwork conveys. Most recently I have been exploring bead weaving and bead embroidery, using tiny Miyuki glass seed beads and Delicas which give a very uniform

12/04/2011

Queen Lydia

This piece derives from a conscious challenge to use colour and asymmetry. I find a lot of inspiration in the natural world, and as a consequence have found a happy default in greens and browns.
The combination of blue and red struck me whilst out with my friend Lydia. A strong, independent woman with vibrant red hair, she carried herself with a particularly regal air. I made a drawing of her one day, standing proudly against a backdrop of bright blue, which suggested to me the ancient queens of Egypt and South America. These colours have been used together there for thousands of years in the form of turquoise, carnelian and coral jewellery. My take on this concept involved many hours of beaded backstitch, where each individual bead is picked up, stitched on, then sewn back through onto a flexible backing. This is then attached to a layer of suede, and edged and fringed with further beads. The Miyuki glass beads range in size from 6 to 15. The piece also contains carnelian, coral, swarovski crystal, poppy jasper and freshwater pearls. The centre turquoise is from the Sleeping Beauty mine in Globe, Arizona and hand cut by artist and master lapidarist Sam Silverhawk.

11/04/2011

Intertidal

I have always been fascinated with rock pools, and in my travels never miss a chance to spend time fossicking around the middle shoreline.
I love the fact that even though tidal pools in different seas are essentially the same, there is always something slightly different about each one. In South Africa, I spent a morning at Cape Agulhas, where the Atlantic and Indian oceans come together. Walking just twenty minutes from the cold, dark Atlantic towards the warm bright blue Indian revealed creatures and shells of an altogether different nature.
Intertidal stems from thoughts of that shoreline. A collection of abstract organic shapes, each one was constructed individually with variations of pe**te and herringbone stitch, before being woven together to form the whole. The seed beads are Miyuki glass, they are embellished with freshwater pearls and the centrepiece hand cut Imperial Jasper from Guadalajara, Mexico. Put together this way, these are not necessarily life forms that occur any given seashore. However, the nature of these miniature worlds means that although this particular pool is nowhere, it is of course everywhere.