Miguel Ángel Flores, a Mexican bead artist with roots in Huichol and mestizo heritage, has emerged as a singular voice in contemporary beadwork through his deeply evocative series known as the Spiral Fetishes. These intricate, three-dimensional objects fuse indigenous symbolism, shamanic cosmology, and postmodern sculpture into a new visual language constructed entirely from beads. Each spiral fetish is not merely an aesthetic artifact but a spiritual vessel—intensely personal and culturally expansive—created through countless hours of meticulous stitching, threading, and beading. With this body of work, Flores has revived and reinterpreted the ancient spiral motif as a living symbol of transformation, healing, and sacred geometry, crafting beaded forms that operate simultaneously as sculpture, amulet, and talismanic narrative.
Flores began developing his spiral fetish series in the early 2010s, following years of training in traditional Huichol bead techniques and experimentation with textile sculpture and installation art. The spiral, a recurring figure in Huichol yarn painting and peyote ceremonies, had always resonated with him as a powerful metaphor for spiritual journey and cyclical renewal. However, where traditional uses of the spiral in Huichol art often appeared on flat surfaces or as part of symbolic mapping, Flores sought to give the form volume and kinetic presence. The resulting spiral fetishes are sculptural totems, most between six and eighteen inches tall, that twist and coil in organic shapes—like emerging vines, coiled snakes, or celestial whirlpools—covered entirely in complex bead mosaics. Their surface patterns glisten with hypnotic intensity, radiating symbolic colorwork and narrative detail that draws viewers into an almost trance-like contemplation.
Each spiral fetish begins with an internal armature, often made from wood, wire, or clay, shaped into a flowing spiral with varying degrees of openness or density depending on its symbolic intent. Flores then applies a thin layer of beeswax—an homage to the traditional method used by Huichol artists—into which he individually embeds glass seed beads with a needle. Unlike flat bead mosaics, these three-dimensional spirals demand an advanced understanding of how curved surfaces distort and reflect pattern. Flores overcomes this challenge through a method he developed himself: working outward from the spiral’s heart in expanding, radiating bands, he stitches beads in directional shifts that simulate organic growth, a technique inspired both by the Fibonacci sequence and the visual rhythms of serpentine movement.
Color in Flores’s work is never arbitrary. Each spiral fetish uses a carefully controlled palette drawn from the artist’s own symbolic vocabulary. Blues and greens are associated with water, sky, and ancestral dreams; reds and oranges reference blood, fire, and transformation; blacks and purples signal the underworld, night, and the unknown. In his piece Ojo de Víbora, for instance, a tightly coiled spiral rises from a base of obsidian-black beads, gradually shifting through bands of crimson and gold to culminate in a serpent’s eye rendered in iridescent violet and lime. The work, Flores notes, is meant to embody the awakening of inner sight—vision that emerges only after descending into darkness. The piece was inspired by a personal experience with ayahuasca during a spiritual pilgrimage, a recurring influence in his creative and spiritual practice.
Animal iconography also recurs in his spiral fetishes. Many feature beaded appendages—horns, wings, talons—that curl out from the main form, transforming them into hybrid entities that defy easy classification. These are not literal animals but spiritual amalgams, what Flores refers to as nahuales, or spirit doubles. In Espiral del Colibrí, a smaller spiral rising from a jade-inlaid base, the beaded surface shifts from turquoise and emerald to flashes of fuchsia and gold, mimicking the iridescent plumage of a hummingbird in motion. Delicate bead strands extend from the spiral’s apex, forming stylized wings that flutter with the slightest breeze. The hummingbird here serves not only as a symbol of speed and grace but also of interdimensional travel—its spiral flight path a metaphor for the artist’s own movements through cultural space, memory, and consciousness.
Though firmly rooted in indigenous symbology, Flores’s spiral fetishes are not confined to ethnographic interpretation. He draws from contemporary art practices, philosophy, and cosmology to develop his conceptual framework. He often cites the influence of Louise Bourgeois’s cellular sculptures, Eva Hesse’s material tension, and the kinetic energy of Jean Tinguely’s moving machines. Yet where those artists explored fragmentation, decay, or mechanized chaos, Flores channels an opposing force: integration through spiraling ascent. His beadwork does not break things apart; it weaves them together—tradition with innovation, personal with collective, spiritual with material.
His works have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout Mexico and internationally, including Museo Textil de Oaxaca, the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, and biennials focused on contemporary indigenous art. Viewers are frequently surprised to discover that these luminous, jewel-like sculptures are functional QR code portals as well—several of the spiral fetishes include embedded scannable beads that link to audio recordings, digital maps, or spoken-word poetry. Flores sees this not as contradiction, but as continuity: the fetish as interface, the spiral as conduit, the bead as node of memory in a networked age.
Flores’s beaded spiral fetishes are also tools of healing. In community settings, he leads workshops where participants co-create small spiral tokens, each representing a personal cycle they wish to end, begin, or understand. These workshops, often held in indigenous and diasporic communities, function as both collective art practice and ceremonial act. Flores describes the act of beading as “stitching time into form”—a way of witnessing pain and transformation through the body. The spirals produced in these spaces are humble compared to his gallery work, but he considers them among his most important pieces. They continue the ancient practice of the fetish not as idol, but as relational object—something imbued with attention, spirit, and shared purpose.
Miguel Ángel Flores’s spiral fetishes stand at the crossroads of the sacred and the aesthetic, the ancestral and the contemporary. They are neither fully sculpture nor fully ceremony, neither wholly art nor wholly artifact. They are meditations, architectures of memory and motion, spun from glass and wax and intention. Through them, Flores charts a path that loops ever inward and outward, reminding us that the spiral is not just a shape but a way of moving through the world: with care, with repetition, and with a vision that understands that progress is not always linear. His beadwork spins stories that gleam with the weight of ritual, calling us not only to look, but to spiral inward toward meaning.