KAY MARIE PORTERFIELD
from Englewood, Colorado
Season of Healing
Doll named Healing
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Land of Odds, Be Dazzled Beads,
The Center for Beadwork & Jewelry Arts, and
The Open Window Gallery present…

Season of Healing

I explore my beadwork with my fingers and all my senses. I feel my doll's creative aura -- "One hundred years from now," I say, "when someone picks up and holds you, they, too, will be at one with the Season of Healing." This figure arose from a shattered place inside of me. It carries the message that creativity holds both hope and healing.

On July 7, 2004, I received an email from my younger brother, my only sibling. In it he wrote that by the time I received it he would no longer be alive. A brilliant computer systems administrator and musician, at 50 he had come to the conclusion he had Asperger's disorder, a form of autism that makes it impossible for those who have it to empathize or connect with others. "Without connection, life is not worth living," he had written. Immediately I called the police in Austin where he had moved and waited, hoping for the best.

As I sat by the phone in Denver, I opened two big packages of assorted glass beads I'd purchased the week before, dumped them into a cake pan and sorted them by color to calm myself. Three hours later, I learned that my brother was dead. The grief that filled me felt like I had swallowed broken glass.

The next three days were crammed with call after call to police detectives, the medical examiner, a victim assistance counselor, my brother's landlord, his former friends, and a funeral home I found in the Yellow Pages. With one hand I held the phone and with the other I fingered the beads in my cake pan. I made a separate pile for the black beads, all the while taking comfort in their cool firmness against my fingers.

The following week a friend offered to accompany me to Texas to clean my brother's apartment. During the entire journey I felt and acted like a robot. When I returned home, however, I wandered from room to room unable to focus on anything but the overwhelming sense of loss that had begun to settle into my bones.

I knew that I had to do something besides wander, so I scooped up the pile of black beads, picked up a needle and began working on a doll that would express my feelings. The fact that the dark glass beads were rough and uneven felt right to me. I began randomly sewing them onto a hastily shaped fabric leg that I had stuffed. Before long, I would see that I didn't have enough to cover more than one leg, if that.

Since it was late at night and I didn't want to stop beading, I decided to use red and purple beads to make a wound on the black leg. As I shaped the wound, I realized it looked like a little mouth and I understood that our wounds speak to us, that healing springs from attending to the wisdom they share. For that reason, I filled the wound/mouth with gold beads, and I as I beaded I consciously began to listen to my loss.

Black leg, wound, gold beads

I "heard" that the figure needed more colorful beads to balance the mournful part of her. As I started the second leg, I used more red and purple beads as well as gold and a luminous blue. When I finished, she had one leg covered with crude black beads that represented the rawness and weight of sorrow of life's inevitable scrapes and bruises. Her other leg, the one covered with swirling seed bead embroidery represented creativity. When I attached her torso, the creative leg supported the leg that was leaden with grief. Together in their meditative pose, they kept the figure from falling over.

Black leg supported by second leg

When I was ready to glue the hands to the body, I saw that they looked too short to be realistic, but they accurately reflected how ineffectual I'd felt to do anything to stop my brother from ending his life. He had attempted suicide months before, and when I had tried to offer support then, he had pulled away, isolating completely. For months I had felt as if my hands were tied.

The doll's hands seemed to need something to hold close to her heart. I rummaged through my button box and found a golden heart that felt right. As I held it in my hand and felt it warm, I remembered how as a child my brother had wanted to play Wizard of Oz over and over again. He would always insist on being the tin man and he would make me be the scarecrow. "Cut, cut, cut, put in brain, sew, sew, sew," he would say. Then it was my turn to give him heart. Now I cried as I outlined the golden heart for my brother, with red beads.

Closeup of heart w/ hands

After I finished this doll over a four day beading marathon, I found the strength and will to begin picking up the pieces of my own life that I had set aside three weeks earlier. Like my Season of Healing doll, I now often have a sad face and a gaze that turns inward. Like my doll I set with grief, feeling it and meditating on it and waiting for this season to pass as all seasons do. While I wait, I am supported and sustained by my creativity, which enables me to transcend it by transforming my wounds into gifts that will touch others who hurt and seek to heal.

Side Image

Back Image

Detailed Image

Healing
(rotation)

Materials Used:
various colors of Czech seed beads (sizes 11 and 10)
bulk glass beads from India (many of which were seconds)
Black B Nymo thread
translucent Premo clay for face, hands and feet
pastels to tint the face
Image from Women: A Pictoral Archive from Nineteenth-Century Sources selected by Jim Harter (Dover Books, 1982)
Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 to manipulate image
gin to transfer image (about 1/4 t.)
gold colored heart button with shank removed
black faux suede cloth about 1/8 yard
poly stuffing

Doll Form:
Cloth stuffed with poly filling

Techniques:
Gin image transfer of color copy onto polymer clay for face
Bead embroidery for body

Dimensions:
Length - 13 1/2 inches (if standing), 6 1/2 inches (seated)
Width - 3 inches
Depth - 2 1/2 inches