There's a woman in my memory who smells like cedar and patience. She is sitting at a table in Kentucky, and her hands are moving with the calm certainty of someone who has done this ten thousand times. She is my grandmother. She is Cherokee. And she is teaching me to bead.
I was not thinking about art history in that moment. I was not thinking about gallery walls or collectors or the word "sculpture." I was thinking about how hard it was to keep the thread from tangling, and how she never seemed to have that problem.
That was the beginning of Dequa Design — though I didn't know it yet. It took forty years to understand what she had handed me.
"I wasn't learning a craft. I was receiving a language — one my grandmother's grandmother had spoken, and her grandmother before that."
From jewelry to something larger
For most of my adult life, bead crochet meant jewelry. Bracelets, necklaces, the occasional ornament. Beautiful objects — but flat ones. Objects that lived on the body and disappeared when you took them off.
The shift happened slowly, the way most real changes do. I started wondering: what if the bead didn't just adorn a shape — what if it became the shape? What if the structure itself was made of beads, from the inside out?
The first fully beaded sculpture I completed changed the way I understood my own practice. It wasn't a piece of jewelry. It wasn't a decorative object in the conventional sense. It was a presence — something that occupied space, cast shadows, demanded to be walked around.
I named it Poppy. And when I stepped back and looked at it, I thought: this is what she was teaching me all along.
What the beads carry
Native American beadwork is one of the most misunderstood art forms in the Western canon. It gets filed under "craft" rather than "fine art," displayed in natural history museums next to pottery shards rather than in galleries next to oil paintings. The distinction says more about the classifier than the classified.
Beadwork — particularly in Cherokee tradition — is not decorative in the diminutive sense. It is narrative. It is ceremonial. It is a record-keeping system that predates written language in these lands. Patterns encode meaning. Color combinations carry genealogy. The act of making is itself a form of prayer.
When I work on a sculpture now, I am aware of all of that weight — and I am also aware that I am adding to it. I am a woman of Cherokee and Irish heritage, raised on a farm, trained as a researcher, living in Florida in my sixties, making art that did not exist before. That specific combination will never exist again.
The beads carry all of it.
"Every piece I make is autobiographical — not because it depicts my life, but because my hands made it, and my hands remember."
B Rabbit and the work in progress
My current project is a two-foot beaded figure I call B Rabbit. He is a trickster character — a nod to the rabbit in Cherokee oral tradition, the quick-minded creature who outwits larger, more powerful animals through cleverness and improvisation.
He is also, if I'm honest, a self-portrait.
I'm documenting B Rabbit's creation publicly — photographing each stage, sharing the process — because I think process matters as much as product. People see finished sculptures and imagine they arrived fully formed. They don't see the weeks of decisions: which bead size, which color sequence, how to engineer a wire armature that will hold its shape but still let the bead surface breathe.
That transparency is intentional. I want collectors — and anyone who is curious — to understand what they're holding when they hold one of these pieces. They are not manufactured. They are not replicated. There is no version two.
Why "Dequa"
My Cherokee name is Dequa. I use it as my art name because it feels true in a way that my legal name — which is perfectly fine, don't get me wrong — does not quite reach.
Dequa Design is not a brand identity built in a marketing meeting. It is an act of naming myself honestly in my work. It says: this came from somewhere specific. These hands have a history. The beads know something.
That specificity is, I believe, the thing that makes art matter. Not technique — technique can be taught. Not even beauty — beauty is common. Specificity. The work that could only have come from this person, in this lineage, at this moment.
Original works available
Poppy, Beaded Mindscape, and Garden of the Mind are available as original one-of-a-kind sculptures through Dequa Design and Saatchi Art. Each piece ships with a signed certificate of authenticity and a handwritten note on the work's origin.
B Rabbit will be available when he's ready. I'll let you know.
Explore the current collection — original beaded sculptures, each entirely unique.
