About the Artist
For years, Mary Kanda of Gloucester, MA had collected ropes of tiny glass beads, convinced that some day she would find a way to bring them into her work. Kanda’s current method of jewelry making is the result of five years of artistic evolution. The inspiration for the method came gradually, as Kanda strove to combine styles she observed during her early years in New Mexico with the environment she discovered after moving to Massachusetts five years ago. Once settled in New England, she wanted to use color more, and she really missed more folk art, craftsy sensibilities.
Kanda’s journey into the arts goes back nearly twenty years. She studied at the San Francisco Art Institute and began her work doing ceramics. After settling in New Mexico, she picked up an interest in jewelry making and gradually made her way into metalsmithing. In 1988, she founded the New Mexico Metalsmiths Association and served as its President until moving out of state. Kanda has also begun teaching her technique to others. The summer of 1998, she taught a class in color and texture at the Penland School of Crafts in North Carolina, in which she used enamel, patination, roller printing and her own bead mosaics to demonstrate her themes.
“I have daydreams about doing larger scale pieces. There is a part of me that loves working in a large scale, but my personality is such that I really like doing handy work and small scale things.”
About the Work
Mary Kanda’s technique is extremely similar to the traditional mosaic style of ceramic tesserae in which pieces of tile are set on a backing and fashioned into patterns. Of course, Kanda uses beads instead oftiles. She creates her designs using seed beads lined up row after row in a silver backing, filling and setting them with tile grout, a claylike substance that hardens to hold the beads in place.
Metalwork forms the foundation for Kanda’s jewelry. She begins her work with a rough sketch and a piece of silver that will serve as the setting. She stars by threading the thin sheet through a roller press, sometimes pressing a texture into the backside. After welding a silver, ribbon like edging around the backing, she begins the painstaking process of laying the beads in place.
She first dabs a small patch of wood glue along the line she wants to follow. Then, she carefully lays the string of beads to follow, tucking them into place and holding them firmly as she gently pulls the string away. Row by row and sometime seven bead by bead, the patterns emerge as she adds new lines and colors. When all the beads are in place, she presses the grout in between the beads and wipes away any excess from the surface. As the grout dries, the beads set firmly into position. Some of the smaller sections can be filled in ten or fifteen minutes, but it’s not unusual for a more complicated piece to take up to four hours. The smaller the section, the more difficult it is for her to make sure the lines of beads are set in just the right place.
Books and Magazines
2007 Cover story, “Ornament” magazine
2005 “The Art of Beadwork,” Valerie Hector, Watson-Guptil Publications
2001 "Color on Metal", Tim McCreight and Nicole Basullak, Guild Publishing 
