REBECCA REEVES

FESTERING GRIEF

solo exhibition

September 5th - 28th, 2025

Opening Reception: First Friday, September 5th 2025

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Arch Enemy Arts presents FESTERING GRIEF, a solo show by Bucks County fiber artist, Rebecca Reeves. In elegant altars of dedication and loss—at once solemn, symbolic and deeply beautiful—Reeves assembles thousands of tiny seed beads, handmades, and found object antiques into elegant, decorative floral arrangements. The result is a moving exhibition of personal history, heritage, and the histories of many; documented through materials and practices that span continents and millennia; and resonate with some of the great American art movements of the 20th century. 

 

Reeves transforms a craft and tradition often relegated to the dusty and unrefined corners of old antique shops. In fact, many of the objects, beads and metal wire Reeves uses to make her work are themselves antiques, either passed down through her family, a long line of collectors, artists, and makers who have lived in Bucks County for generations; or discovered at any of the myriad antique treasure shops in the area. Reeves taught herself how to sculpt hand-beaded flowers, a process widely known as French beading, by purchasing them from these stores, disassembling them to learn their structure, then remaking flowers of her own. In this way, she not only honors the tradition of Victorian funeral object-making but also the hands of the many women who dedicated their skills to this laborious and beautiful craft. 

 

“I used to make perfect beaded flowers, resembling real life,” Reeves writes. “But that seemed like a facade to my true feelings. Grief isn’t perfect. It’s festering beneath the surface, interweaving throughout our bodies and minds. Since losing many of my loved ones, I feel like parts of me are missing, dropping out like a decaying bouquet of flowers. I find there’s a deeper, more interesting story in flowers that aren’t perfect, and I hope people connect with the work on their own personal level of loss and love. My aim is to honor their mourning as well as my own, to pay homage to mourning traditions, memorials, and the beauty in death and decay.”

 

FESTERING GRIEF is profound because its themes are ubiquitous; the work describes a feeling we all must endure. Losing someone you love is a harrowing experience, yet Reeves presents her grief with such beauty, depth, and inspired precision; remembering those she has lost becomes, also, an act of celebration. With sumptuous sparkle and nuanced assemblage, subtle variations in color, tone and type of bead, along with her manipulation of their skeletal wire armatures, Reeves’ work is like an impressionistic dance of light and color, a luminous and resounding song of death and decay, sung with flowers that echo through time. 

 

Rebecca Reeves (b. 1971) lives and works in Upper Black Eddy, Bucks County, PA. She attended Bucks County Community College before studying at Tyler School of Art and obtained an MFA in Fiber from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1998. She has exhibited widely across the United States in both solo, collaborative, and group exhibitions; her work has been published in Lilith magazine, Beautiful Bizarre, Create!, and in an interview with NPR, among others; and she has co-curated exhibitions and participated in countless lectures on Victorian handicrafts, art, and thanatography. FESTERING GRIEF is Reeves’ fifth solo feature with Arch Enemy Arts, it includes some of her largest works to-date, and it is dedicated to her dear friend, Pat Klein, another Bucks County fiber artist, who passed away last year.

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FESTERING GRIEF will be on view from September 5th - 28th, 2025
Sold works will begin to ship the week starting October 5th, unless other rush arrangements have been made.

Payment plan options are available on most works. All items marked with a red dot have been sold. 

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