Basket Weaving

(from The Omniart Notebook:)

 

The ice storm brings trees down all over town. There they still lie, most of them, a month later, except for the ones that fell across roads, which have been cleared. 

 

Every block has a heap of limbs by the side of the street. Crews from the city roam around with roaring, barking, tree eating monsters called chippers. There's free firewood wherever you go.

 

I begin to wonder about how to make art from this grand natural windfall. There is all the lichen. You can make natural dye with it. You can gather tons of it as whole trees covered with it are suddenly quite accessible. It takes years for lichen to grow, so this is a real bonanza. But, it turns out, the dye making process needs ammonia, and months of checking and shaking in jars. This is yukky. The traditional method is to use your urine. More yukky. Never mind the lichen.

 

Then I notice all the fallen young tree top branches and shoots on the ground, in all manner of lovely straight and twisty shapes and colors. 

I've always wanted to learn basketry. Basket making feels like such an ancient art. But like most other weaving, handwoven baskets have long since been met with superior competition in most of their functions, save art and subsistence work. 

 

The Japanese for example, have taken basketry to amazing heights of artful precision and grace. 

But all over the world now, the five gallon PVC bucket serves far better for what the basket used to do. Then there is the paper bag. The cardboard box. The plastic trash bag. Each of these, we must grudgingly concede, has a functional kind of beauty.

Colorful hand spun art yarn and hand woven hats and scarves are nice, but in this world today the humble factory made tee shirt is far more important to humans everywhere, with its fine, flexible weave and fit.

But. Well...when I was a young student of art, everyone made fun of anything woven. A degree in basket weaving. That was the joke about the absurdity of learning folk art in a school I suppose. It is really the most low caste form of weaving, practiced by the some of the lowest paid women in the world. I got no support for that. Maybe that's why I never ventured there.. 

 

Until now! We make a daring raid on a beautiful broken branched wiggly willow tree in town. You have to suit up in denim and gum boots, climb out over the roaring creek on just blackberry canes, to reach the fallen tree branches.

 

I love the internet! You can learn anything you want, whenever you want! Your teachers are others like you who share what they know. Don't look now, but I honestly think that much of schooling today is obsolete. 

 

So I give myself a basket weaving class. I weave my first basket. And another, and two more.

 

Also, the branches themselves teach me. The way they want to go, to twist. How to tuck down the ends. The power and beauty of circles, figure eights. 

I notice that while in the pile, the branches seem to go every which way, but once you start winding them around one another, they fit together, harmoniously interlocking.

 

I pick some scotch broom, our local invasive plant, as suggested by one website. (Funny, the ice storm didn't do anything to them.) One basket gets a bit of it woven in. 

 

There is certainly plenty of it around. But I find the feel and smell of it, uh, yukky. Oh well. Oh but Wilbur the kitten loves it. He even nibbles on the scotch broom.

 

So I make some baskets. I love baskets, and use them everywhere in my fiber studio. Yet these baskets I have made are Art Baskets. Each one takes all day. Yes they will hold things.

 

 But I wonder if I will pick them up as readily as the subsistence baskets, those expertly woven in minutes, one after another, all day long, in practical, functional, traditional designs, by some poor person on the other side of the planet. The ones I can buy at the Goodwill for the price of a cup of coffee.

 

I just wonder...

 

"To value yourself less than God values you is not humility, it is pride of a most destructive nature." - Ken Carey