Liz Cooksey is a British bead artist whose delicate, lace-like creations capture the fragile beauty of the natural world through a masterful combination of wirework and bead embroidery. Most celebrated for her intricate representations of insect wings—particularly those of dragonflies, butterflies, and bees—Cooksey’s work evokes a sense of suspended animation, as if she has caught fleeting moments of life in mid-flight and preserved them in a web of thread, wire, and shimmering seed beads. Her art exists in the liminal space between structure and air, weight and weightlessness, where the boundaries between craft, sculpture, and drawing dissolve into gossamer detail.
Based in Manchester, Cooksey was originally trained in textiles and fine art, and she brings both disciplines into play in her beaded compositions. She begins each piece with an armature of fine, hand-shaped wire, forming the essential skeleton of a wing or botanical element. Onto this frame she weaves a delicate lattice of threads—linen, silk, or cotton—often dyed in subtle tones that mirror the organic hues of insects and flowers. The beads are then stitched into these filigree-like structures, adding light, texture, and a pointillist vibrancy that recalls dewdrops or grains of pollen suspended in morning air. The result is a hybrid form of lace and sculpture, light enough to sway in the breeze yet detailed enough to withstand intimate scrutiny.
What distinguishes Cooksey’s beadwork from traditional insect illustration or naturalist sculpture is her commitment to essence rather than exact replication. While her wings are anatomically respectful, they are not photorealistic. Instead, they operate like poetic translations—suggestive, atmospheric, and emotionally resonant. A dragonfly wing might be rendered as a whisper of gauze pierced with tiny glints of bronze and emerald, each bead a spark in the network of veins and translucent membranes. In her hands, even the smallest details—an antenna, a jointed leg, the curve of a thorax—are transformed into visual metaphors for fragility and persistence, presence and impermanence.
Color plays a vital role in her compositions, but always in a restrained, naturalistic register. Soft sage, pale gold, milky white, and stormy gray dominate her palette, echoing the subtlety of lichens, dried leaves, and the translucent shells of insects. These tones are not just aesthetically pleasing—they are part of her dialogue with nature, where drama is often quiet, and the extraordinary is hidden in plain sight. Her choice of beads is equally refined; she uses a variety of finishes—matte, pearlescent, iridescent—to evoke the changing qualities of light across a wing’s surface, mimicking how sunlight filters through glass or glints off water.
A signature work, Chrysalis Veil, consists of a pair of large-scale butterfly wings, each frame no more than a few millimeters thick, filled with lacework so fine it seems spun from mist. Beads shimmer like dew along the wing’s contours, suggesting both fragility and transformation. The piece was inspired by the artist’s observation of a butterfly emerging from its cocoon—a process Cooksey equates with the act of creation itself: gradual, uncertain, miraculous. Chrysalis Veil was displayed suspended from nearly invisible threads in a gallery space, and as air moved gently around it, the wings seemed to flutter, breathing with the environment.
Cooksey’s fascination with insects is not purely aesthetic. She views them as symbols of ecological intricacy and quiet resilience. In her series Pollinators and Patterns, she created dozens of small framed studies of bees and moths, each one positioned like a specimen but rendered with emotional subtlety rather than scientific detachment. The wings of these creatures were composed of overlapping bead lines that pulsed outward like the rings of a tree or the ripples of disturbed water, suggesting that every creature exists within a larger web of interaction. For Cooksey, the wing is not just a structure—it is a map of interdependence, a surface where art and ecology converge.
Her process is slow and intentional. Cooksey often begins with observational sketches, many made in botanical gardens or during countryside walks. These drawings are less about anatomical accuracy and more about capturing mood, atmosphere, and rhythm. From there, she builds her wire frameworks, often reshaping them repeatedly until the tension and balance feel right. Beading is the final stage, and it is where the work takes on its sense of life. She has said that she thinks of each bead as a “breath,” and the stitching process as a way to breathe structure into stillness. The meditative pace of her practice is part of what gives her work its distinct sense of calm and focus.
Though small in physical scale, Cooksey’s work has gained wide recognition for its refinement and emotional depth. Her insect wings and botanical pieces have been exhibited in fine craft shows and textile art exhibitions across the UK and Europe, where they are often displayed in shadowboxes or suspended in space to highlight their delicacy. Viewers frequently describe them as ethereal, otherworldly, and hauntingly beautiful—artworks that seem to exist between nature and dream, evidence and myth.
Liz Cooksey’s beaded insect wings are more than decorative marvels; they are intimate studies of life’s transience and wonder. Through wire, thread, and seed beads, she captures what is most elusive: the shimmer of sunlight on a wing, the stillness of flight frozen in time, the quiet miracle of transformation. In a world often dominated by noise and spectacle, her work invites viewers into a space of reverence and attention, reminding us that the smallest creatures and the most delicate forms are worthy of our deepest admiration. Her wings do not fly, but they soar—in meaning, in craftsmanship, and in the imagination of all who behold them.