Roseira

Clear light

The clear pieces are the ones that change most between one room and the next. Cut faces do not hold a colour of their own so much as borrow one: against a white curtain in the middle of the day they go almost invisible, and the whole strand reads as a line of light with a shadow under it. Move to a lamp and they warm up. Hold one against a window at the end of the afternoon and the faces throw small coloured marks onto whatever is behind them. Nothing about that is an effect Claudia added. It is what happens when something faceted is held up in a room with a window in it, and it is the reason this is the largest group in the collection.

It is also the most various. A clear run can be pushed almost anywhere by what is set into it, and the pieces here go a long way apart. One is nearly colourless with two pale blue notes where holy water would be, and it is the lightest thing on the bench. One shifts bead by bead from blue-green to amber and back, so that no two neighbours match and the eye never settles. One is the deepest violet she works, cut so that it takes light instead of swallowing it. One alternates deep wine with near-clear the whole way round, which makes it read as something half-lit — the right condition for a season spent waiting. One carries a name in lettered beads. They have almost nothing in common except that light gets through them.

That is worth knowing before you choose. A clear piece is the one to pick if you pray somewhere with a window: at a kitchen table in the morning, in a car, in a pew near the aisle. It is not the one to pick if the piece will live in a pocket and be told in the dark, where a heavier, plainer strand gives the fingers more to go on.

They are also unforgiving to make. Cut faces this small show every link that is not square to the next one, so the whole run has to be turned to a single angle and any link that drifts gets reopened. Fifty-nine beads and more, each turned onto its own wire and closed by hand, is a long way to hold one angle.