Pip Drake is a British-born, New Zealand-based bead artist whose monumental meditation bead tapestries have become synonymous with contemplative craftsmanship and spiritual introspection. Known for her quiet intensity and deeply personal approach to materials, Drake has carved out a unique space in the global bead art landscape by transforming traditional meditation beads—known variously as malas, rosaries, or prayer strands—into expansive wall-hung compositions that blend textile, sculpture, and sacred geometry. Her works are not simply decorative or symbolic; they are durational records of mindfulness, woven through hours of repetitive stitching that echo the very meditative practices they seek to honor.
Drake’s fascination with meditation beads began during her travels through India and Tibet in the early 2000s. There, she encountered mala beads not just as spiritual tools, but as personal objects of wear, lineage, and inner discipline. Intrigued by the idea that each bead represented a breath, a repetition, a sacred pause, she began collecting them and learning about their various uses across religious traditions—Buddhist, Hindu, Catholic, Islamic. Back in her studio, Drake began dismantling these strands and reconfiguring them as part of larger visual systems, recontextualizing them not as wearable objects but as compositional units in tapestries meant for stillness and reflection.
Her earliest meditation bead tapestries were small, intimate panels—perhaps two feet square—built around central mandala-like formations. Over time, her scale and ambition grew, and her technique expanded from simple stringing and knotting to complex bead embroidery, couching, and textile layering. Today, her largest works can reach over ten feet in height and involve more than 100,000 individual beads, each hand-stitched into a carefully calibrated design that reflects both aesthetic precision and symbolic order. These tapestries do not merely hang—they radiate. Constructed on grounds of raw linen or hand-dyed silk, the beads form concentric circles, labyrinthine spirals, and wave-like grids that invite the viewer’s eye to wander slowly and mindfully.
Drake works primarily with natural materials: wood, bone, shell, rudraksha seeds, semi-precious stones, and glass. She sources antique meditation beads from temple markets in Nepal and Burma, as well as from estate collections in Europe. Each bead is chosen not just for its texture and color, but for its history and energy. The tactile irregularity of a centuries-old bodhi seed or the gleam of a weathered rosewood bead gives her compositions a palpable sense of time and continuity. These elements are often interspersed with Japanese seed beads and Czech fire-polished glass to create points of light and rhythm within the more organic field.
One of her most lauded pieces, The Breath Remains, features 108 lines of beads stitched in horizontal rows, each line composed of 108 beads—mirroring the traditional Buddhist mala configuration. The entire tapestry is framed in dyed indigo hemp, evoking the sky or deep sea, while the beads themselves shift in tone from earthy ochres at the bottom to pearlescent whites at the top. Viewed from afar, the work reads like a wave or a sound frequency rising through silence. Upon closer inspection, each bead is slightly different—some worn smooth, others cracked or pitted—each one a tactile relic of repetition. The piece was acquired by the Auckland War Memorial Museum and is displayed in their contemplative arts wing, where visitors have described the work as “breathing on the wall.”
Another striking piece, Omphalos, takes the form of a circular tapestry four feet in diameter, composed of spiraling coils of beads that echo the navel stone of Delphi mythology. Here, Drake incorporates volcanic stones, obsidian, and Himalayan quartz alongside coral and turquoise mala beads, drawing connections between body, earth, and cosmos. The entire tapestry is stitched onto wool felt dyed with iron-rich clay, producing a ruddy, earthen backdrop that grounds the composition in mineral reality. The spiral—a symbol of inward turning and growth—appears frequently in her work, not only as a motif but as a compositional logic.
While many viewers approach Drake’s bead tapestries as abstract or decorative, they are in fact deeply narrative. Each piece records the hours of meditation that Drake undertook while creating it. She works in silence, often in natural light, and begins every studio session with breathwork or chanting. Her stitching is timed with her breathing, and her hands move not to a design pre-determined on paper, but in response to the meditative flow of the moment. She has likened the process to walking a labyrinth—methodical, internal, and full of small discoveries. As such, each tapestry becomes both an external object and an internal cartography, a map of mindfulness rendered in bead and thread.
Drake is intensely private, rarely giving interviews or public appearances. However, her exhibitions—held in quiet, low-lit galleries designed for slow viewing—have drawn acclaim for creating spaces of genuine retreat. Viewers often spend long periods in front of her work, drawn not by spectacle but by subtlety. The soft clinking of beads against fabric, the variations in sheen and shadow, the density of the stitched surfaces—all conspire to create an atmosphere of stillness that is rare in contemporary art. Critics have compared her tapestries to Rothko’s color fields or Agnes Martin’s minimalist grids, but with a tactile presence and spiritual intent all their own.
Drake’s influence is increasingly felt among a new generation of textile and bead artists interested in slowness, ritual, and embodied practice. She teaches occasional workshops, where she emphasizes process over product, encouraging students to let their breathing guide their stitching and to treat each bead not as a building block, but as a moment. Her studio practice, situated at the foot of Mount Taranaki, is a fusion of land-based knowledge and inward focus. The volcanic soil, the shifting coastal light, the long days of silence—all seep into the rhythm and palette of her work.
The meditation bead tapestries of Pip Drake are not simply artworks to be viewed, but experiences to be entered. They invite not just aesthetic appreciation, but presence. In a culture dominated by speed, spectacle, and disembodiment, her work offers a powerful countercurrent—a slow unfolding of color, rhythm, and meaning, bead by bead, breath by breath. Each tapestry is a sanctuary stitched into being, a place where time is marked not by minutes, but by mindful repetitions, and where the smallest of objects—the humble bead—becomes a conduit for stillness and transcendence.