If you’re someone who has always wondered if science and art can meet somewhere in the middle, the answer is yes. How did we come to that conclusion? By sitting down with Leslie Chang, a woman working in oncology drug discovery and bead art.
“I’m a beader and a scientist, but I was a beader first,” Chang said. “I’ve always been fairly artistic. I took art lessons as a kid, but I didn’t do any beadwork. It was painting, drawing, and sculpture, but surprisingly, I didn’t have the patience for it.”
Now, Chang does a form of art and works in a field that both require an extreme amount of patience.
“I started beading as a kid and then on and off throughout my life, but I became reinvigorated doing it when I went into a bead store in downtown Boston,” Chang said.
She said that she had always been fascinated by small things, and most of the beads she works with are very tiny. She also saw this tie into science, using biology as an example, where she’d be interested in the small things of nature, like insects, geckos, and other animals.
“There’s this uniformity toward being drawn to the miniature,” she said.
As an adult, Chang doesn’t just make bracelets. She also turns images into beadwork, which can take hours of her time due to both the planning and execution processes.
A software converts Chang’s image of her choosing into beads; she then uses beads from a Japanese company called Miyuki and hand selects the colors that she wants to match the image. This alone, before any beadwork is involved, can take anywhere between a week and a month.
She then showed off some of her pieces, including a colonial house, an Italian landscape, birch trees, and Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night” in bead form.
Her biggest work took her 70-80 hours as she had to thread one bead at a time while using a chart to make sure she was following the color pattern in a paint-by-numbers style.
Chang said that some pieces can be a little bit faster because she can pick two beads up at once instead of one, but it still takes plenty of time and concentration.
When asked what her favorite piece is, Chang said, “My favorite piece is always the last one I made. There’s so much heart that goes into it, and I don’t sell these, but if I mark them for sale, they’re extraordinarily expensive because of the time it takes. They’re really a labor of love.”
When connecting back to her job, Chang said that she finds similarities in both spaces, but beading has also become her way of recovering at the end of the workday.
“I have to do a lot of pipetting… We work with 96- and 384-well plates, and you have to pay attention to detail and have the ability to repeat yourself over and over again. There’s also a lot of critical thinking involved, and you have to be able to troubleshoot,” she said.
While Chang’s bead landscapes and framed pieces are a labor of love, her bracelets and earrings are just as important to her, and she’s found a way to share that through social media.
Chang will make posts showing her working on her projects, and while she beads, she talks to her audience about science and her work, creating a niche audience of art lovers and science lovers.
“It’s been great connecting with people. I’ll film myself making a tapestry, and it’s obviously very repetitive, but then I’ll talk about the work I do. Because I work in cancer, I call it oncology research; it seems to really connect with people,” she said.
The piece Chang is currently working on is an image of cancer cells under a fluorescent microscope, tying further into her work.
Chang then showed off her collection of bracelets and earrings that are hung up in her workspace. Together on their rack, the bracelets create their own little tapestry of beadwork, and Chang also uses real gemstones to make some of them.
“You can always tell they’re real gems because they’re sort of irregular, like this lapis lazuli. This really deep, rich blue is something you can only get from a gemstone,” she said.
If you’re in search of handcrafted bracelets or earrings, Chang’s work can be found online. You may even see a piece you’re looking to buy get created on her social media pages.
To purchase one of Chang’s pieces, you can visit her Etsy page called Bay State Beadcraft. To see the time and effort put into her work, you can visit her Instagram page, also under Bay State Beadcraft.
