Debra Booth

Dequa — Debra S. Booth
Cherokee · Irish · Tallahassee, Florida
Dequa is my name in Cherokee. It is also my art. The two have never been separate.
I am a beaded sculpture artist rooted in a tradition my Cherokee grandmother placed in my hands as a young woman. She taught me bead crochet — a practice of patience, precision, and cultural memory. As my hands have aged and my artistic vision has deepened, that tradition has evolved into fully beaded sculptural work: three-dimensional forms brought to life one seed bead at a time.
My pieces draw from the natural world — monarch butterflies, wolves, rabbits, flowers — rendered in thousands of micro beads across curved and complex surfaces. The imagery is intuitive, rooted in Cherokee reverence for the living world, and informed by a lifetime of looking closely at beautiful things. Each piece carries geometric pattern, nature symbolism, and the quiet accumulation of thousands of individual decisions.
I work slowly. Deliberately. A single sculpture can take weeks or months to complete. This pace is not a limitation — it is the point. In a culture that rewards speed, I make things that demand time. Things that will outlast me. Things that ask the person holding them to slow down too.
For for...