Artist Rachel Burke experienced trauma from repeated miscarriages. Tiny plastic beads helped her heal

"We have to be wary of assuming that because something's colourful, it's about joy," Rachel Burke says. 
(Supplied: Melanie Hinds)

By Eloise Fuss

Rachel Burke's designs — worn by stars like Harry Styles and Cate Blanchett — are outwardly cute, colourful, nostalgic and unashamedly dopamine-inducing.

The Brisbane-based multidisciplinary artist, designer and author is known for her sunshine-and-rainbows crafty creations.

Her tactile, wearable tinsel outfits have become iconic — and easy to spot on red carpets.

But for the past two years, behind her sparkly public presence, she's been processing the devastating, dulling impacts of personal trauma.

Isolation and shame, medical misdirections, pain and dangers — these were all things Burke
had to process in the wake of miscarriage. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)

In 2023, in the aisle of a craft store, she experienced the second of three miscarriages she'd have that year, including a twin pregnancy.

"I was buying some melty beads … and I had to go to the bathroom in that store and complete the pregnancy loss," Burke tells ABC Arts.

For much of the following year, she kept her successful Instagram page brimming with engaging creations, while privately taking the time she needed to start processing her experience.

And she did this in the most self-confessed Rachel Burke way possible: "manic crafting".

Her material of choice? Melty beads. That experience in the craft store had stuck with her.

"Symbolically, suddenly the melty beads took on a lot more meaning," Burke says.

A plastic craft material often used by children, melty beads are arranged on a grid in patterns, then ironed to melt and fuse the beads together in an image.

"They are really fragile, like one knock, which I do all the time, will completely ruin the design. Things can really go wrong with the whole process.

"I felt like there was a weird little layer of it mirroring my own [experience], the fragility of baby creation in some way."

"People donate their craft stash to me all the time ... because no-one knows what to do
with them," Burke says. Not so in her case. (ABC Arts: Eloise Fuss)

More than half a million melty beads later, Burke has created the body of work, Thanks for Nothing, currently on display at Side Gallery in Brisbane.

She hadn't started off aiming to create an exhibition, but she realised there was an important opportunity to speak out about the "taboo" subject of miscarriage.

"The process of obsessive, repetitive creation became both a refuge and a mode of healing, allowing me to confront and process my grief and transform it into something tangible," she writes in her artist statement.

And, as an artist, she felt a responsibility to share her work with the many others who had experienced miscarriage.

"Manic crafting" is how Burke describes her creative process of working with beads at
a traumatic time. (Image: Lara Furst)

Making and processing

Leading up to the exhibition, manoeuvring past Burke's bustling pair of sausage dogs, down the stairs of her Brisbane Queenslander, leads into an expectedly colour-drenched home studio.

It's down here that Burke creates her incredible work, including creative collaborations with major global brands like Disney, Lego and Barbie. (Her ABC interview was almost rescheduled due to Airbnb booking her as a stylist on a project in Goa, Western India.)

First published at ABC News, February 6, 2025

Read full story here.