Bead Dreams, 2014: Crime

 This piece needs a whole lot of explanation. 

Nope, it's not a pelican, although it sure looks like one, and that's ok by me.

What the black bird monster is, is the Kókó.

Not many of you will know who Kókó is, so let me tell you about him.

He eats little children. Alive. He is of Portuguese origins, well known ins Spain too,where he is called  Cucuy, and  there they have a  sweet nursery rhyme about him that goes

Duérmete niño, duérmete ya...

Que viene el Coco y te comerá.

                                                          Sleep child, sleep now...
                                              Or else the Coco will come and eat you

 He apparently has a lady friend , the Coca who hides on rooftops waiting to take children who don't go to sleep as they should.

In Spain, The Coco/ Cucuy is oftentimes portrayed as a ghost with a pumpkin head.

In my childhood, no one portrayed him as anything, other then the ONE who will  surely come and eat me alive if I don't go to bed.
How on earth did a Portuguese  monster sneak into my Hungarian bedroom? I will never know.

 I remember a night I spent at my grandma's house with my aunt. My aunt is only 8 years older then me, and 13 years younger than my mother, and so we were quite close, more so than her and my mother used to be.

I was about 4 or 5 and my grandma put me to bed, and my aunt kept on sneaking to the door opening it just enough to poke her hand in, making horrible shadows with her spider like moving fingers telling me that the Kókó is coming to get me. My grandma did not understand why I was shrieking with terror, and my aunt of course assured her that she has not done anything to facilitate my reactions.

There were metal bars on the window of the room and wind outside  at night, and the knowledge of things in the dark, things that somehow eat children alive.

 Now, most people will think that this must have been an entirely traumatic experience for me, but for whatever reason I found my footing in the world of shadows and dark creepy things just fine, and up till today, nothing sets my mind at ease as much as good horror stories and movies. 

There used to be a wolf living under the sink in the bathroom in our old family apartment, who prevented me from going to the bathroom at night, man under my bed who would rip my arms off if they poked out from under the blanket, a devil paper mache mask on the wall that became real at night, and antler trophies complete with skulls accompanying the devil in the hallway as lesser demons.

Not to mention the boogeyman, who is called the man with the sack. He comes at night too, but in my book, he was less formidable  and far more civilized then the Kókó, because he cooked children before eating them, after transporting them in his sack. But my sister feared him more than the Kókó.
 To each her own, I guess.

My first nightmare I can recount was my pillow shaped stuffed frog swallowing me whole while the devil in the hallway laughed. I can still mentally rewind the details.

But in many ways real everyday life turned out to be a lot less reliable and orderly than Kókó, the man with the sack and the wolf under the sink were....

One makes bargains with one's monsters. They always follow rules.
(In stories and fairy tales  there are always rules of conduct for monsters. These rules unfortunately don't apply to fellow humans. They are a ruthless bunch, )

So maybe that's why I was always ok with the monsters and they became acceptable parts of life for me.

One night quite a while ago, I  was in that really sweet place inbetween being awake and falling asleep, where ideas oftentimes emerge from, and I was thinking how Kókó never really took a shape for me. I was wondering what would he look like. All the sudden it came to me that he was a big meany bird.

 Kind of like the tragically beautiful Greater Adjutant, cousin to the Marabou Stork.

 Look at this face, isn't he just the most charming sort of ugly?

I also wanted to reference the creepy plague doctor masks from medieval Europe.

Nothing creepier than that.Deliciously, delightfully creepy every which way.

That's how the Kókó came to be a bird. And he symbolizes my fears, and bad feelings that accompany my childhood. The fish he holds in his claws is my childhood self I guess, if I have to be analytical about this piece.

Hence the name Crime.The bird herself, well it's a bird. Not going to go into details about that.

But there is more to this story, and what comes around, goes around, expect part II in the form of Punishment in about 2 months......

For now, I am grateful and humbled by this piece being accepted as a finalist for Bead Dreams.
Also want to thank Matthew Nix for supplying my with the eyeballs for the necklace.

The necklace was made with a whole lot of Swarovski stones (sorry did not count) even more other type of Swarovski crystals ( bicones, rivoli drops, and I certainly did not count those), and about 80 grams of size 15 24 carat gold plated miyuki beads.