An ongoing practice exploring data as something made, not extracted. Each piece begins with a small, personal dataset (a timeline, a friendship, a set of losses) translated into material form bead-by-bead. The slowness of the process is the point: what a spreadsheet compresses in a second, the hands take hours to hold.

1. Years of Freedom (From Depression)

Czech glass beads, Japanese toho beads

A tactile timeline: gold for years of relative freedom, deep red for years of depression, purple marking the transitions between them. Each bead corresponds to a year, threaded in sequence — not to chart a recovery, but to hold both kinds of years simultaneously, without resolving one into the other.
The years themselves were never recorded or tracked; they were already known, retrospectively, through memory. Figma was used beforehand to work out the bead math: how many beads per year, how the timeline would fit the length of the necklace. What changed through the making wasn't the dataset, but my relationship to it: threading each year slowed the memory enough to be met, rather than simply recalled.

Working out bead math in Figma before beading began.

2. Cherish Time (co-created with A.Q.)
Czech seed beads, Rose quartz

Made with a friend: two dates, the year she was born, the year we met, established together, then mapped in Figma to plan the necklace's proportions before beading began. What to include and what to leave out was negotiated between us, not assumed by me alone.
Certain things were deliberately excluded — not forgotten, but withheld. A friendship holds difficult years too; this piece was never intended as a complete record of them. Given as a gift, it continues to accumulate meaning through wearing — its significance isn't fixed at the moment of making, but ongoing.

Bead math in Figma prior to beading.

3. Love & Grief
Czech glass seed beads, freshwater pearls, gemstones

Seven people I've lost, held without dates, hierarchy, or names. I began by trying to record this properly — names, dates, relationships, structured like data. Categorizing loss that way felt instrumentalizing, so I abandoned it, keeping only the number seven as a structural constant. Everything else such as sequence, colour, placement was governed by intuition rather than record.
Some things are not mine alone to translate into data. Where full categorization would have meant a kind of false completeness, I stopped — certain aspects of grief resist becoming information, and that resistance is part of what the piece holds.

Bead math and data exploration in Figma. An early attempt to structure this as a table. I abandoned it — see caption above


About the practice
I trained in data visualization; I also come from Pakistani textile and craft traditions such as Ajrak, and Ralli, in which cloth and beadwork have long carried memory and lineage, not merely decoration. This practice sits between the two, borrowing the discipline of data (structure, sequence, deliberate decision), without its usual aim of clarity or efficiency.
Each piece begins with a dataset too small, too personal, or too relational for a spreadsheet. The slowness of beading is intentional. A necklace can hold what a dashboard cannot: contradiction, ambiguity, things left deliberately unsaid. What is omitted is as carefully considered as what is included.
This body of work forms part of a practice-led PhD at RMIT University, where beadwork is developed as a method for engaging data materially and relationally.