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BETH GRANT The East Garafraxa glass artist imbues her glossy beads with the colours and feel of the great outdoors, especially the expansive Far North. BY GAIL GRANT
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Artist Beth Grant creates lampwork beads at her worktable inside Orangeville’s Dragonfly Arts. above Swirls of colour are a hallmark of Beth’s jewelry designs.
espite the biting cold outside artist Beth Grant’s cozy workspace at Orangeville’s Dragonfly Arts on Broadway on a recent January morning, the colours the artist is shaping into glass beads easily conjure up warm summer landscapes and long blue rivers. Indeed, Beth’s mind is never far from such natural beauty. “Often, during the creative process, I am transported back to the sights and scenery of one of my northern canoe trips, and I find the shapes and colours reflected in my work,” she says of the beads that go on to become jewelry and other artful objects. For the past 30 years, Beth – a mother and grandmother – has lived on seven acres of an East Garafraxa sugar maple bush backing onto the Grand River. Still, she says, “The farther north I travel, the happier I become.” Beth attributes her passion for the North to an image of an iglu she saw in a book as a young girl. She built on that fascination during undergraduate studies at York University, when the department of biology offered the opportunity to join a field trip to what is now Nunavut. After that, she made
the trek north for seven summers while in her 20s, earning a master’s degree in plant microbiology and conducting research for various universities and federal departments. As she studied the flora of the Melville Peninsula, the area that was the focus of her research, she immersed herself in the culture, colours and moods of the region. Years later, Beth’s obsession would find an outlet in a modern take on the centuries-old Italian glass-blowing traditions of Murano, Italy. She had worked with stained glass for many years, but in 2005 she and her friend, Dragonfly Arts owner Joan Hope, rented torch time at a glass-blowing studio in Beaver Valley and started to experiment with making lampwork beads. Centuries ago the glass for these beads was heated over a small oil-burning lamp, hence the term “lampwork.” “During the initial learning stages, our focus was so intense that Joan and I would drive home from Beaver Valley in a state of total exhaustion after spending just a few hours working with torches and glass,” says Beth. Now her time with the studio torch is a more meditative experience. During my visit, Beth shows me how she routinely makes a bead. She begins with a mandrel, a stainless C O N T I N U E D O N N E X T PA G E
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