Beadwork — Sophia Anderson

Beadwork is a letter I send and receive from the spirit world

My chicha (grandmother) was a master bead-worker. She was a perfectionist, and my dad remembers her unravelling days of her work just to correct a single irregular bead. She passed away when I was young due to Alzheimers, so I didn’t get to hear her talk about her memories while we were on this planet together. I started beading because I wanted to understand her better, to reconnect to my heritage while living off reservation. It has been a meditation, a life line, and a past-time.

Washaway after a winter storm is a piece inspired by Washaway beach, named for its rapid erosion, partially due to early dredging & dams built on the Columbia. Almost two miles of coastline has been eroded and a whole town has been washed away, including a cemetery, school and lighthouse. If you are interested in learning more, here is an article published in the Seattle Times in 2020. There is a huge community effort to stop the erosion, working together until the name Washaway No More.

Shoalwater Bay (2024) is a name given by a settler to these ancestral lands inhabited by indigenous peoples for the last 2000 years. This piece is the largest beadwork I have attempted so far, and took over 100 hours to complete. It depicts what is probably the most familiar view I have of these lands, on the beach I grew up walking on nearly every day. If you are interested in learning more about our our tribe’s history and origins, here is a link to our tribe’s website.

What began as me trying to somatically recover the memories of my chicha (grandmother) became me creating a patchwork of my own.

The following works are from a series I began at the end of 2023, when i finally moved back to the reservation where I grew up. They are glimpses of significant moments I have experienced since being back on my native land. From the meteor shower that rained across the sky the first night I slept in my new home, to the pattern of the tide-drenched sand on my first walk back on the beach, each of these moments is concentrated down to a 1 1/2” square. This culminated at a solo show, “keep-sake” I had at SOIL Artist-Run Gallery in Seattle at the end of 2024.