Beaded Skulls, Margaret Arnold

The beauty and grace of a skull cannot escape the burden of its symbolism, grim and disturbing concepts such as violence, mortality and evil. Though in modern popular culture the symbol of the skull has moved from the fringe province of bikers and the tattooed to that of the general population (today anyone from a toddler up can be outfitted with skull tennis shoes, socks, shorts, t-shirts and all accessories), the skull remains a symbol of general and directionless rebelliousness, even in pink, even on a beach umbrella. The bead is likewise fraught with religious, cultural and social significance. Beads have turned up in sites more than 80,000 years old and mark the beginnings of human symbolic thought, originally representing or conferring abstractions such as status, power and magic. In many cultures today beads retain this association with social, religious and economic position.

In joining skulls and beads I hope to use each to relieve the other of its historical significance and allow the pure beauty of each to emerge- to see the skull as a simple, clean form, relieved of its ponderous darkness by the addition of brilliantly colored, bright and shiny objects, and to see beads as purely delightful, relieved of their endless cultural significance by pairing them with death, the great equalizer.