UNCHARTED WATERS by Pam O'Connor
BEAD ARTIST GAIL GORLITZZ STEPS OUT OF BOUNDS

It doesn't take long to realize that Gail Gorlitzz is game for anything. She fairly hums with energy, and her conversation moves nimbly from the pros and cons of various beading threads to the brain chemistry of teenagers. This enormous appetite for life is also clearly evident in her beaded artwork.

"When I start a piece, I set a problem for myself, an issue to work out," she explains. "As it progresses, something unexpected must emerge to engage me . . . If the work doesn't have that, I destroy it or change it utterly."

This "take-no-prisoners" approach to her work was evident in a recent one-woman show at the Glass Gallery in Bethesda, Maryland. Vividly imagined and boldly colored, the collection of works taps into a creative sensibility at turns witty, poignant, and surreal.

Indeed, Gorlitzz's work expressly eschews pat forms or pretty finesses. You might anticipate a work with the title Precious to be diminutive and, perhaps, smack of the banal. You'd be wrong. This impressively large piece stands over 3 ft. (.9m) tall. At first glance, its shapely, burnished-gold contours suggest an elegant Fortuny lamp. But look again and you're in uncharted waters. Unruly freeform elements stake out territory around the form's middle, and a mad outcropping of organic embellishments that appear to be barnacles below a rumbled and spiny cap, top the piece. A tail-like rope spirals from the form around the cage-like metal base (originally a lampshade frame). With its wild wraps and a color gradation that intensifies to deep purple, it both echoes and critiques the staid curvilinear shape above it.

Driven by color

Scott's explicit, boundary-pushing work may have influenced a piece like Big Red. Here is a red so vibrant it almost pulsates, and the form, settled upon a carved wood pedestal, is suggestive, to say the least. But unlike Scott's more representative work, Gorlitzz employs an abstract playfulness. In Big Red, there's a sly humor in the multiplicity of the appendages. Like many of her pieces, this one relies on a metal armature. Gorlitzz co-opts lampshade forms, lamp bases or other found pieces to give structure to her beaded sculptures. But, ultimately, it's the expressive use of color that is most potent in her work.

"Much of my work with beads is driven by color. I am constantly surprised by by how the colors change and how layering colors transforms a piece," she asserts.

Progressions in hue and clashes of color energize the undulating vines of Babylon I and II. But the flexibility of the form -- that there is no set way to display the pieces-- is also a trait Gorlitzz cultivates "I like the fluidity and flexibility of beadwork, it's changeability -- whether in the way light affects the colors or in the malleability of the stitched form," she says, encouraging me to touch her pieces. The Babylon works obviously reference the famous hanging gardens of the biblical city, but also her own long-standing love of the natural world.

Magic and humor

Her childhood was enriched by an artist mother and a doting grandmother, who loved taking walks with Gorlitzz, telling her stories, and collecting. "She would collect things with me, just things off the street, and she would tell me stories about them," remembers Gorlitzz. "Because of this collecting and my close relationship with my grandmother, I have always felt that found objects are emotionally resonant, even magical." Objects disca

rded and domestic take on enchanted roles in many of Gorlitzz's works. In Scheherezade, a lamp base and the stopper from a decanter are magically transformed into a meditation on the most famous of female storytellers. Her life literally hangs by her narrative thread as the ripe shape of the wine stopper -- encased in beadwork and suspended by a crystal-embellished strand -- suggests. A glittering tail (or tale) winds around the base of the graceful arabesque from which the stopper is suspended.

Gorlitzz's wit and sense of play have even larger expression in Significant Other. "I love to include jokes and tricks in my work," she says with a twinkle in her eye, before asking me to squeeze the silicone "implant" inside one of the appendages of this saucy piece.

Here, the circular, black metal armature is largely exposed and contrasts with the lacy lingerie look of the beading. Both ends of the armature have intensely beaded centers. Of course, its shape suggests a breast, but the long snake-like appendage emanating from one end indicates otherwise. The two intensely beaded poles, one red, one black and purple, are connected by a beaded network that seems to reference fishnet stockings and nerve synapses simultaneously. Gorlitzz is clearly having a bit of wicked fun.

Surreal and unflinching

Undeniably Gorlitzz's work challenges anyone who thinks beadwork can't be high art. Moving and unflinchingly direct, a work like Little Wound speaks with gruesome clarity about pain and the vulnerabilities of the body. Inspired by the difficult death of a beloved cat, a grisly piece of beadwork is set upon a pedestal that is surrounded by surgical tubing, both beaded and not. Vivid purples, reds, and blacks give the piece a rawness that is underscored by the disturbing inclusion of a threaded needle. The piece summons a gut reaction with a surreal clarity reminiscent of Frida Kahlo's evocations of pain and suffering.

By choosing beadwork to speak her mind, Gorlitzz invigorates the medium, dispelling old biases and inviting us to rethink our expectations. With drama and humor, she engages us and gives beads and thread consequence.