Perspectives Exhibit in Corning

A friend of mine commented that she hadn't read anything about my acceptance into the ISGB Perspectives exhibit in my blog.

"Why so quiet?" she asked, "I thought you were excited."

Well....I am excited. I've never submitted any of my beads for anything. Ever. I've never even taken my beads into a bead store to try to sell them. I did this on a whim, out of some belief that I just needed to put myself out there and see what happened.

The Perspectives exhibit is part of the Glass Art Society Conference in Corning, New York. It's a juried exhibit presented by ISGB, representing styles, techniques, and processes used in contemporary glass beadmaking. The collection will be on exhibit from June 5 to September 7 at the Radisson Hotel, Corning, and opens specifically as part of the 2009 GAS Conference.

Also, the top three beads with the highest jury scores will share the cover of the summer issue of The Glass Bead magazine, a quarterly publication from the ISGB. Here's a link to the slideshow of all of the beads: http://www.isgb.org/info/article_256.shtml

So, anyway, my bead was accepted and how happy and proud and excited I was! Yay! They like me. Oh, they really, really like me!

Here it is, by the way:

Then I saw the other beads.

Oh no.
How humiliating.

I mean, those beads are art. Some of them are so amazing and intricate and fabulous that I was embarrassed that I even submitted mine. I am seriously outclassed. I didn't even make anything special for it. I just sent pictures of a bead that I particularly liked and thought highlighted a cool technique I'd been working on.

Don't get me wrong. I really do love this bead. It has a wonderful, free-flowing vibrancy that I think sort of sums up not just my artistic style, but me. But it's far from being the greatest bead I've ever made. I'm thinking it's just going to get swallowed by the fabulousness that is the rest of the exhibit.

Now I'm kind of sorry for my little bead and hope it doesn't feel too badly about what I've subjected it to.