Last year I was introduced to the Zimbabwe-based Marigold Beads. The project was established in the early 1990s to provide livelihoods for women in Zimbabwe’s second largest city of Bulawayo who, for various reasons, left formal education at an early age. Today the center operates as a co-operative with Johannesburg-based artist Joni Brenner contributing to a collaborative model of design development with the bead weavers. As necklaces their palettes and patterns are utterly contemporary, while drawing on a rich heritage of bead work historically found across southern Africa. More recently the bead weavers have also embarked on unconventional collaborations such as converting the data of genome research into poetic color fields.

“I’m often asked, who is the designer?” Brenner explains of her partnership with the bead looming co-operative Marigold. The artist’s contribution to Marigold, which is located nearly 900 kilometers north in Bulawayo, now extends over thirteen years. “Because the beaders are far away,” Brenner reflects when we recently spoke, “I rely on them to take control of the monthly production. It is important there is a shared understanding, a learning process and constant negotiation of the designs.”

Established in the early 1990s, the original Marigold members attended workshops aimed at the development of self-sustaining co-operatives led by the Danish aid organization Mellemfolkeligt Samvirke. But by the mid-2000s Zimbabwe’s economy was in freefall and this, coupled with a decline in tourism, threatened the co-operative’s survival. The tenacity of three founding members – Siphiwe Dube, Sifiso Mathe and Teresa Nkomo – kept Marigold alive.

While beadwork appears across the continent of Africa, the introduction of bead-loomed production to Bulawayo remains a mystery. The oral history of the co-operative remembers that Danish support originally provided materials, but the knowledge of bead weaving on a frame is attributed to “Margaret’s mother”. In the publication Making Marigold: Beaders of Bulawayo (Palimpsest: 2017), Brenner and Elizabeth Burroughs write:

The beaders are clear that both Margaret and her mother were Bulawayo people and lived in Pelandaba. Siphiwe Dube also recalls that Margaret’s mother had produced loomed mohair sweaters and scarves. No one at Marigold knows how Margaret’s mother had learned to loom beads or where, but it was she, not the Danes, who taught them the craft. Strange as it may seem, no one remembers Margaret’s surname, or her mother’s (p. 57).

Crediting individual makers by name has been used globally as a strategy to overcome the anonymity of craft production. But it isn’t an approach that accurately reflects the nature of much craft production. In Marigold’s studio, four or five beaders work around each table. Other than some specialist tasks such as stitch-joining the strands into a loop, the work is understood and identified by the women as the co-operative’s. “When I ask who made a specific necklace, it is not always known. The classic narrow necklaces are made in groups of three – they are almost the same, bar slight differences in length and perhaps one or two other shifts, where perhaps one is in a different green bead to the other two. Longer necklaces can often be the work of two people.” Brenner’s question of attribution remains unanswered.

Today Marigold’s one hundred and thirty variations and counting of handloomed necklaces are based on a consistent format of a single loop in lengths of fifty-six to sixty centimeters long, with between 4800 to 5000 beads in each necklace. Wider, longer and thinner variations are also produced with the longest, once joined, about one hundred and twenty centimeters, which allows for wrapping two and even three times around the neck. Depending on the complexity of the design and the amount of color combinations required for a necklace, production can take anything from one day to one week or more.

Ironically, Marigold’s commitment in 2011 to a single type of product may explain the co-operative’s longevity. Working exclusively with the form of the looped necklace means the technique has been perfected, allowing for room to focus on risk taking in the design and color combinations. Working with one simple form allows the beaders to focus on the question: “what small change can we make to this specific necklace pattern to create something different?” Close attention is given to how a particular range of designs coheres with the necklaces sent to Brenner monthly often suggesting a collection or set.

The ongoing process of making small changes to existing designs continues today, including designs that have taken Marigold in novel directions. On occasion the team undertake special projects with the necklace form tasked to carry unusual sources of inspiration. Brenner, for example, saw the visual data maps her husband, Scott Hazelhurst, was producing with the team of scientists working at the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of the Witwatersrand, and realized there could be a new application for Marigold’s skills. The team’s data maps the genetic admixture of various population groups that aid understanding of population interactions on the African continent over the past 5000 years. Marigold has produced beaded interpretations of the data in 2017 and, using updated scientific data, again in 2024. The latter marked the tenth anniversary of the Sydney Brenner Institute for Molecular Bioscience (SBIMB) at the University of the Witwatersrand where the team’s significant research is ongoing.