Survival Instincts addresses nature’s brutality through six beadwork pieces displaying the parallels between selected bugs and the human condition. Starting with sketches, then precise bead mapping, each artwork is painstakingly built bead by bead, intended to mirror the raw tension between delicate craft and the carnal urge for survival. These bugs and insects’ visceral processes of reproduction and evolution hit hard against human stories of love, power, and control.

From the scorpion’s deadly mating ritual to the damselfly’s breakout flight, the show strips down the messy, violent, and beautiful side of survival. Influenced by feminist thought and power dynamics, these works expose how unconscious steps toward survival inform our deep and darker motivations.

By bead-mapping these concepts into aesthetically pleasing and glistening walls of beadwork, Survival Instincts proves that beauty and brutality aren’t opposites but two sides of the same coin.

Artist Bio

Bianca Velasquez is a beadwork and process artist whose practice centers on the therapeutic and narrative power of making. Working across painting, beadwork, and poetry, Velasquez creates large-scale abstract works that explore catalysts for grief, joy, growth, and decay. Each piece becomes both a meditation and a dialogue between material, emotion, and story.

Her work resists linear storytelling, instead unfolding through texture and repetition. Beads function as both material and metaphor: containers of memory, markers of time, and anchors of healing. Through a process balancing between plans and intuition, Velasquez transforms the act of beading into a code that speaks to the complexity of human experience and the cyclical nature of transformation.

For Velasquez, healing is not a linear journey but a living process: chaotic, intricate, and profoundly beautiful.