Your bottle of Blue Sapphire has become a light blue necklace. Your bottle of champagne adorns a beautiful woman wearing pale green powder beads. Those terrible pink chinese glass plates that flooded ghanaian markets were smashed to make lukum-coloured rosé beads that resemble quartz.
In Ghana, most things have a second life, get upcycled and recycled with imagination and genius.
The glass from bottled gets grinded and filled into the moulds you can see on the picture, mineral colour dyes are added in layers to create patterns and then poured into the vertical clay moulds.
One artisan heats the moulds in a kiln for a few minutes, then quickly pushes them over to his artisan-partner who turns them around to create the round or cylindrical shape and perforates them.
The process happens at high speed as the heat has to be conserved and the dexterity of the artisans is impressive. Whilst the documentation of the powder beads dates back to the 1920's, it is believed that Ghanaian powder glass bead making dates further back (Archeologists found coloured glass beads in South Africa dating to the Xth century).
I first came across powder beads in the West African market in Nairobi and together with the traders' amber beads and camel bone beads, I immediately felt drawn back to the times when this form of trade brought us fascinating, unseen objects from far away countries.
