Wampum Presented by xox to the Queen came from a machinima that I was planning to make, in which my avatar, xox, would have an audience with Queen Elizabeth II. What would happen during the visit, aside from xox giving the queen a piece of her mind? Well, she would probably first present her Majesty with a wampum belt, like the Four Kings did in 1710. This wampum belt features a representation of xox and the Queen holding the Two-Row wampum, the one created to remind the Europeans that we had agreed to live together side by side without interfering in each other’s governance.

Because pink is such a powerful, feminist, and –yes, my fave—colour, I decided that it must be the background colour. I spent a lot of time trying to find pink wampum beads. I even hired someone to make them for me, but it turns out that fucshia is simply not available to glass or ceramics. I decided to paint each wampum with nail polish, which comes in every pink imaginable. I also ended up nailpolishing the Queen’s blue sash. The beads used for the tiny Two-Row are actual shell wampum