Dordogne, Berkshire, Catalonia (Part 1 Dordogne)

During last week, three unrelated events took me to a French lycee in Perigueux, a museum in Berkshire and a basketry fair in Catalonia. The self-employed life has always been like that and I have learnt that, you have to take opportunities when they are offered because turning them down, however genuine the cause, hurts the proposer and they seldom repeat the invitation. It was mentally taxing doing all three, one after the other, but my carbon footprint was considerably reduced by linking the three events together and that was important for me.
I have divided this blog into 3 separate posts to make it a tad more digestible!

When I was invited to do an ‘intervention’ at the Lycee Albert Claveille in Perigueux, I liked the proposal very much but was anxious about how I could actually achieve everything. The brief was to give a talk about my work and to teach 105 fifteen to eighteen year old pupils some basic basketry techniques in the space of about 4 and a half hours. All of this to be done in French, which for someone who failed French O level, is an achievement in itself.

Never having taught in a Lycee I had no idea what to expect. But I am a great believer in preparation because if I have done as much of it as I possibly can and done it as well as I know how, the chances are things will work out in the end. It also helps hugely to have someone in the school who has thought of everything from their point of view too. I was very lucky to have Celine, one of the applied arts teachers, initiate the project and plan it extremely well with 5 teachers, 4 classrooms and video projection for the practical instruction. I did the talk first, then three demonstrations, which were projected so all pupils could see, then they were split into 4 groups each with a teacher and I went from room to room. In the end it was a very positive experience for me as the pupils listened attentively, asked lots of intelligent questions and then made 3 different samples from recycled paper or card in random weave, diagonal plaiting and hexagonal plaiting (more photos in the schools facebook link here )

              

The applied arts teachers will continue the project using polypropylene strapping tape and I am looking forward to seeing what they come up with.
Thanks to Karen Gossart and Corentin Laval for suggesting me to the school.

One of the teachers, S. Frangeul, brought in some baskets from his personal collection and this one I found particularly interesting. He told me it was a dough basket from the Dordogne and that he also had a smaller one at home. It has a linen lining common on dough baskets but the shape and the random weave were unlike any other bread raising basket I have ever seen. It is a big basket maybe 70cms long and looks more like a flower basket to me. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has come across any others like this.

Paillasses and Peluches

Bric a bracs are a recurring theme for me because apart from the visual spectacle of a sea of  peluches (soft toys) or a crate of keys, they always have lots of old baskets in them.

 

Most of them are horrible commercial varnished things, made to sell cheaply, often imported from China or bought as  souvenirs in some far flung place.  Sometimes though, there are also old local baskets coiled from straw and bramble ( paillasses or paillassous)  that were made to store dried plums (these are known here as bourgnes) or to raise bread dough and no doubt many other uses  unimaginable to us now.

Unwillingly, as I am not too keen on clutter,  my studio has become  the rescue centre for these lovely old baskets as I find them too difficult to ignore in their often derelict state. This year however, I have blocked my ears when visiting bric a bracs  so that I cannot hear their plaintive cries, enough is enough! But I swear they know I am there. During the weekend of the Assumption  there were bric a bracs on Saturday as well as the  Sunday and I knew, somehow, I wasn't going to get away with coming  home alone. Having walked for at least an hour round the Sunday market in the streets of a local village and within metres of the car for a quick getaway,  I was feeling smug that not a centime had escaped my purse when I saw her. Sitting proudly above the sea of plastic junk on the wobbly wallpaper table, with her lid fitting as snugly as a sailors cap,  she was scanning  the hoardes as they pushed past  and before I had a chance to hide, she had spotted me and was calling out.

How could I resist? She was lovely, no holes, no worm, beautifully made, all that remained was to pay up. The owner had gone into her house to cook lunch and so was dragged out, wiping her hands on a tea towel, by someone manning the stall for her.  Apparently it had been made locally and had been in her family for four generations. We calculated that she must be over 100 years old but she really doesn't look it - the basket, of course, not the owner! She said she would have liked to have kept it for her children and grandchildren but they hadn't shown any interest in it. I won't tell you what I paid for her because it's not polite to talk about ladies this way, but it wasn't much,  lovely old baskets have little or no value for most people here now.

 Back in my studio she has found a warm, dry home and some friends. I will have to start finding good homes for them soon.....

A Family of Baskets

Knowing I am interested in old baskets, Neil, a  friend and professional electrician, brought these baskets for me to look at. He spotted them in the loft of an old farm in Charente, Limousin that had just changed hands and where he was working on the renovation.  The previous owners were 'paysans' and these baskets were  obviously made to be used on the smallholding.

It is unusual to come across a collection like this. Baskets that are thrown into lofts and forgotten are usually destroyed by woodworm.  Coiled straw baskets tend to survive in  the Charente because woodworm are not very interested in straw, though they will have a go at the bramble stitching. Sadly the two large frame baskets had either had something damp left in them or been sitting under a leak. As a result the chestnut frame work has become a filigree of worm tunnels in just a couple of places on the bases and are now ready to crumble away. The worms like their wood damp, I guess its easier on their teeth!

Eel traps

Not only is it unusual to find a group like this in relatively good condition but the variety is intriguing. Among them are chestnut eel traps and baskets, one for harvesting root crops which acts as a sieve and a little rectangular one with a pegged base and rim, possibly for egg gathering. Then there are several chestnut and split willow frame baskets, three of which have been made by someone who has done many of these and knows exactly how to do it. The very small one without a handle is beautifully made.

 At first I thought it had lost its handle but in fact the ribs have been carefully cut to a point where they meet on each side so perhaps it was never intended to have a handle. But  I cannot  be certain, as someone may have shaped the rib ends after the handle had broken. There is also a tiny frame basket, again chestnut ribs and split willow like  the bigger ones, but it was never finished. I almost burst into tears looking at it as my first and slightly bizarre thought was that the maker had died before finishing it. Since then I have rationalised it as a "teaching aid" for the grandchildren which makes me much happier!

It seems highly unlikely that these baskets were all made by the same person, though possibly by two generations of the same family, and the person who made  the three brown willow baskets obviously never had access to the 'teaching aid'! These three  look much more recent and are great examples of someone just having a go,  without much prior knowledge, and arriving at something that functions.  It wasn't without a mega struggle though, and if the maker won in the end, the willow certainly  put up a good fight.

In a way I love these baskets as much as the perfectly crafted ones. They seem to prove the theory that  basket making is innate in all of us, not the arty farty, tidy,  tightly controlled kind of basket making that I and many others engage in, but a raw, energetic, wrestling with twigs to make a basket to gather the crop in before  it rains or the winter sets in.  How the basket looks being of zero importance in this context.

There is a similarity with music making which also appears to be innate in all of us. Thomas Brennan, my Irish father in law had only one question for people who said they could play a musical  instrument... "can you get a tune out of it?" He wasn't interested in whether they knew their scales or could read sheet music, all that mattered to him was whether or not they could play a tune he could dance to. As far as Thomas was concerned, music was for dancing to, just as these baskets were made for carrying crops and nothing else is therefore relevant.

Sometimes it seems as though too much knowledge suffocates the life out of things.

More Bric a Brac Baskets

It's bric a brac/ brocante  season again but this year has not been good for the vendors. The local paper forecast it would be the best year ever in the region because a record number were planned, but nature intervened. Earlier in the season, quite abnormally, it rained heavily without fail every Sunday. The rain and cold was followed by searing heat and who wants to slog around a field in 34C looking at dusty things? Certainly not me. So, this year I have, so far, escaped most of the pitiful cries of orphan baskets calling out to me from under tables.

This Sunday was a close call however, as I nearly came home with an enormous and truly handsome basket. But, in the end, I decided it would have been like bringing a comatose giant home  that couldn’t do much of anything except occupy a huge amount of space.

Coincidentally, I would not have even been at a brocante had it not also been for extreme weather. A terrifying thunderstorm with hurricane force winds and torrential rain on Friday night cut off the electricity and phone for the weekend. Not knowing how long we would be without electricity and having a dead mobile it seemed a prudent idea to go somewhere to charge it, preferably a nice bar. So, it was a bonus to arrive in Aigre to find a brocante in  full swing. There were a lot more local baskets for sale than usual, but now they really do have to be good looking for me to be susceptible to their simpering. It’s prejudice, I know, but I have to look at them every day!

Chatting to a friend, without my glasses on, I noticed what looked like a large ridged metal container in the distance, then I tuned into the whingeing and knew that it wasn’t metal. Putting the glasses back on revealed a tour de force of coiled straw one and half metres high and about 70cm across and oval in form. Rather sinisterly there was an ancient doll lying face down in the depths as though she had fallen fatally from the rim, I wanted to pull her out but couldn’t reach down far enough.

The vendor said the basket had come from a boulangerie in the Limoges region but she had no idea what it was for. You couldn’t put anything too small in there because you would never get it out again and if it was for flour the flour at the bottom would never be used, which could prove fatal for the customers!

The price was so low I would not have even bartered but I knew I had to resist.  If, however, our paths cross at some future date, I will probably invite the giant to come home with me as I will consider it our destiny that we have met again.

The Basket Sanctuary

Drying out

Its cooler, the nights are closing in on the days and the bric-a-brac season in the Charente is, thankfully, coming to an end.

It has been a good summer for the local ‘brocanteurs’ wanting to offload their abused traditional straw baskets and now I have more than I really know what to do with in the basket sanctuary. There is no need for me to seek these baskets out at bric-a-bracs as they seem to find me quite easily. I can hear them calling out to me from under tables or behind boxes, it’s a plaintive attention seeking cry and I appear to be the only person that hears it. Sometimes I try to walk past them, but the cry just gets louder and more distressing. Occasionally they use their charms on me and it’s as though I have caught the eye of an attractive stranger across a crowded room. I look away but within minutes I cannot resist looking back to find them working their spell. 

I resisted this one because he was trying too hard and I wasn't going to be fooled by the so-called 'lid'!

 Each basket is different, with its own personality.  There are solid, rough, rustic ones made by impatient people with big hands. And there are fine ones made with thinly pared strips of ronce (bramble) and stitches so close together that the maker must have spent a whole winter making it. I try not to buy two the same shape or form but sometimes I do, because each one was made by a different person and they all have their individual characteristics.

 

When I bring them home I give them a good dusting with a bristle brush, then a hoover, followed by a bath in cold rain water, as they are always filthy, then they are left to dry naturally in a warm sunny spot. It may not be an orthodox conservation technique but they seem to like it and come out shiny and warm and smelling like hay. Sometimes they have evidence of woodworm, but if the suction and drowning haven’t killed any live larvae then drying out the basket properly will usually make them move home because they prefer moist materials. 

The injuries will take longer to deal with as there are feet and bottoms missing and cuts around the mouths. At the moment I see two options. They can either be stitched back together in the traditional way, with straw and split ronce, or they can be repaired with other materials in such a way that it draws attention to their scars and makes the viewer see them differently and not just as old baskets repaired. These 'old' baskets were young once and served their families well for many years, now they deserve to be respected and celebrated and given some tlc because they have tales to tell us of past lives we can hear no other way.

Salt Cure in the Pays Basque

"The cure for anything is salt water: sweat, tears or the sea."

 Isak Dinesen, The Deluge at Norderney, Seven Gothic Tales, 1934

Wild, windswept, west facing Atlantic beaches suit me.  Perhaps it has something to do with my Shetland heritage but, maybe, it is also  the Robinson Crusoe in me that knows there will be flotsam scattered on them. East facing beaches are not the same, the sun feels as though it is in the wrong place once the spectacle of dawn has passed and at sunset there are no livid reflections on the water.  Town ‘beaches’ don’t really merit the name, surrounded as they often are by cliffs of flats, cars and intense commerce. I appreciate my taste in beaches is not everyone’s but the 300km long one pictured above created by Napolean and his engineers to keep the sea out of Les Landes is really quite special. Backed by vast man made sand dunes and around a million hectares of pine forests there are no buildings, cars, sewage outlets or ice cream sellers and you can walk miles in each direction and still not find any of those things. Almost every year I return for a few days to this coast and it never fails to perform its cure.

Admittedly flotsam has always held a particular attraction for me. I cannot lie around on beaches with idle hands so I like places where there is a ready supply of materials. This coast has always obliged in the past with rope and plastic of all types and in all colours. Last year I found these small plastic wheels.

I have no idea what they are, or why they were in the sea, but this year …..nothing!! The beaches had been cleaned and my source of materials removed leaving just clean white sand. I walked for hours and only found a handful of short pieces of rope barely enough to make a table mat. So I just had to lie around and not do anything, and actually it was quite nice, I might even consider repeating it, one day.

Forty kilometres south of this beach is the town of Bayonne in the Basque country and here the Musee Basque beckoned me in. Amongst its treasures were these folded “handkerchief “ hats, origami with a black handkerchief,  one of  which appeared also to be woven. The label was skimpy and the on line catalogue didn’t add anything, but I came to the conclusion that the pattern had in fact been pressed and starched into the fabric – possibly using a basket as the mould. If anyone knows more please enlighten me.

Other gems were the little flutes made of hazel bark used by goatherds in the mountains, I had seen similar in the Santiago de Compostela museum in Galicia.  There were also beehives and eel traps but I was running out of time and still had not found any ‘chistera’ (bats for playing jai alai ). Finally reaching the attic space I found them in a purposely dimly lit room that resembled a cathedral treasury, I could hardly make out these poetically arranged precious ‘relics’ in the gloom but their significance in the culture of the region was evident.

The chistera on display made of chestnut and willow were all part of a single collection acquired in the 1950’s, each one slightly different and strangely mystical displayed in this way. You can see them in better detail in the Museums online catalogue and read a concise history here of their origin and present day manufacture by the Gonzales family in Anglet.  The Basque country spans the French -Spanish border and many things are the same either side of the frontier including jai alai bats. You can read here about a Spanish maker of these bats. 

In a local bar on the counter were these small chestnut baskets and again this is a basket form that is found right across northern Spain. Later in the day I saw a municipal gardener working on a roundabout loading a larger version of this basket with prunings but I haven’t yet mastered the art of steering round roundabouts whilst taking photos and I was keen to get back to my salt cure.....  I just hope that I don’t end up looking like a kipper!

Baskets, Birds and Bavarian Slippers

It seems to me that there are some days when there are a series of malicious events just waiting for you to get out of bed so that they can ruin your day. It is as though they have arranged it amongst themselves. And then there are some days that are filled with precious little delights that also seem to have formed, what I suppose one might call, a  ‘glee’ club and last Saturday was one of those.

Emmaus had an all day event on and, as I furnish my home and clothe my body with other peoples cast offs, it was too tempting to pass by. I was rewarded not only with a lack of crowds but, with two more dirty, broken and abused Charente baskets and a pair of seemingly unworn Indian woven leather shoes, that fitted, all for 5€.

Walking down the road with my treasures I bumped into Sam, owner of MaBootique a vintage clothes shop, who told me that there was a pair of slippers waiting for me at their house nearby. What a lovely present Miles had found for me. They were extraordinary, clownish,  plaited straw Bavarian slippers that just made you want to smile.

Onto the market where I spotted and chased down a blue coil-plaited strapping tape basket and its owner, neither of which I had seen before. She was in a hurry, or quite possibly I frightened her rushing at her brandishing the camera. But, she did tell me, just before she ran away, that she had bought it in Morocco from a man who usually makes the palm leaf version. I have seen similar ones in Spain but the colours, translucency  and  immaculate technique made this one particularly good, and brought back some special memories of learning the technique from a group of elderly women in Mallorca.

After this excitement the supermarket seemed more tolerable than usual and then became way better than usual when I noticed a sparrow tucking into the mushrooms. After gorging itself on the champignons de Paris and pecking tentatively at the pleurottes it flew up into the artificial orange tree that dangles its moribund plastic foliage over the produce counters. 

Sparrow and its reflection

Does it live in the supermarket all the time, does it know what life is like out of doors, or has it found a way to enter at will when it fancies something other than insects for dinner? Oblivious to the security gates, security tags and security guards with their punk collared security rottweilers, this little bird thieves at will and as it does so nibbles and pecks at the profit margins…. go for it little bird ! 

Bric a Brac Baskets

Summer is bric-a-brac season, and each Sunday these outdoor markets occupy public squares, parks and football pitches all over France. Sometimes they are called bric-a-bracs, sometimes brocantes and sometimes vide greniers, but the subtlety of this nomenclature eludes me because they all look like car boot sales, with a few professional dealers thrown in.


Sellers need to enjoy watching the sun rise. Pitches are established on a first come basis before dawn and, if you are an amateur, it is necessary to be awake enough to haggle with the professionals who scan the contents of your car with their torches as you wait for it to get light enough to set up stall. If not, you discover when you do finally wake up that the things they bought from you in your early morning stupor are now on their stalls at twice the price.

Keen collectors also arrive early but those who go for the spectacle, and barquettes of freshly cooked frites or a glass of wine for 50c (unheard of in a bar) arrive at lunchtime, when eating has become the priority for sellers and buyers alike.  The picnic tables are laid, the camping chairs clacked open, corks popped and Sunday lunch is enjoyed surrounded by many of the same possessions that previously graced the diner’s homes. These are now no longer wanted, liked or needed and sit sulkily on the grass hoping to attract new and kinder owners. If you find something you want to buy at this time of day you are far more likely to get a good price simply because you are taking up valuable eating time. 

Visually raking over the tables laden with the physical manifestations of consumerism, I try to understand this foreign semiotic language. What could possibly have made someone want to buy a coat rack made out of the bent feet of goats nailed to a wooden board! And why does no one want to keep these lovely coiled straw baskets that are the tradition of this region and which embody so much of the history of rural existence here as it was only 70 years ago? What do either of these observations tell me about the people who once owned these objects?

That these Poitou Charente baskets employ the same materials and techniques as those of the Shetland tradition seems too coincidental for me to ignore and the temptation to become a rescue centre for these filthy, abused and neglected baskets has overwhelmed me. Invariably, after failing to persuade myself that I do not need another basket, I part with a few euros, (I don’t usually haggle as knowing the hours of labour that went into their making they are, for me, too cheap already). As the coins slip into the sellers pocket, I am aware of the burden of responsibility I am taking on. Now, I will have to find some way of dealing with this rapidly increasing collection of large baskets that will give these humble objects back some of their simple beauty and dignity. 

Click here to see more baskets

The Law of Material Sufficiency

Over the years I have noticed a little known phenomenon and as I have never seen a name given to it I have decided to call it the Law of Material Sufficiency. Not dissimilar to Parkinsons Law  (Cyril Northcote Parkinson 1955) "work expands to fill the time available for its completion" ........ it works like this....

Having done some experiments and decided that I want to use a particular material for whatever it is that I am making, I then select from my boxes and sacks of collected materials the actual materials for the task. As I don't buy materials there needs to be enough for whatever job I have planned for it but, this is very difficult to guage accurately so, usually, I just hope and trust that there will be enough. The astonishing thing is, that  nearly every time it works to such a fine degree that I find myself  scrabbling in the bottom of a sack or a box to root out the last few centimetres of whatever it is to add the final touches, and it happened again this week.

I was given a  Limousin woven chestnut chair in very poor condition. Filthy, riddled with woodworm, a lot of broken splints and the joints very loose and after giving it a serious scrubbing I realised that actually I didn't  like the chestnut splints very much. But I found the curved form and simple stick structure of the chair very seductive so I decided to use the broken splints as fire lighters, but keep the frame and restore it in my own way.

My initial idea was to use either tetra paks or corrugated cardboard in the same fashion as the splints, that is, to weave panels and then nail the completed panels to the back and seat. But weaving a panel and attaching it to something never excites me as much as working 3 dimensionally and as I was restoring the chair for my own use I saw no reason why I should bore myself whilst doing it. In addition I find it hard to trust nails now after too many experiences of splitting wood by using the wrong nail for the job, and the chair was already splatter-gunned with nail holes. So, I abandoned the panel idea.  Weaving over the structure with tetra pak and cardboard strips was the next thing I tried, but neither felt strong enough and the curved shape didn't lend itself to this type of weave.

There is a sack of used polypropylene strapping tape in my studio. It is the remains of a large amount of waste tape that  I collected some years ago from a packaging company in London for a public commission that I was working on at the time .The tape came wrapped around the pallets of cardboard they imported and every day of the week they threw out one or two skips full of it. The skips were emptied into a barge on the Thames that floated downstream to the implausible sounding Mucking landfill site in Essex where this still perfectly functional tape was interred along with all the rest of Londons' so called waste. Something that struck me when I collected the material from the company was that the workers there obviously sensed that the material was not really 'waste' because they often bundled it into neat little hanks before throwing it into the skip, even though they were not asked to do this.

I have now used most of the colours that I like and had been  left with a large amount of very stiff, transclucent green tape that, until now, I have had very little use for as I did not find it particularly attractive or easy to work with.  But after a cursory rummage in the sack I realised that its moment had arrived (is this another law - when the right job comes along the material ceases to be unattractive?) and the chair has been woven with it and, as usual, I have been left with barely a metre of tape!