Dordogne, Berkshire, Catalonia (Part 3 Catalonia)

From Reading to Catalonia to arrive in the last hour of the annual basket fair in Salt on the outskirts of Girona, so I made a quick dash around to try and see as much as possible before it closed. The Fair is organised by the Catalan Basketmakers Association who had invited me to run a post fair course for some of their members. On the Monday a group of us headed out of Girona to Toroella de Montgri to visit Josep and Magdas  workshop/shop. Set in a narrow street it had a cave like feel, filled with basketry, materials and chairs for restoration and where in a dark corner a female ‘gigante’ watches over everything.

On to the house that the association had rented for the course set on a ‘slow’ farm in the countryside, then off to the beach at the mouth of the river Ter to gather both beach flotsam and maritime rush Juncus acutus. Never having had a chance to handle this version of rush before I now understand why it is used to make fish traps and baskets like the saranda - it is very tough. Josep taught us how to pull it from the plant in two movements but some plants surrendered their rushes much more easily than others!

There were 13 students, Italian, French, Venezuelan and Spanish, most of whom are professional makers who had just had a hard weekend of selling at the fair so I offered them an opportunity to ‘play’ and to experiment rather than to impose specific techniques on them. But I did ask them only to use materials that were free. In fact some purchased materials were brought to the workshop and used towards the end and the machine split chestnut bands were perfect for certain techniques. It would be great if someone in UK could make those, or ash or hazel ones for us. Anyone know a wood/coppice/forestry business that might take it on, or at least give it a go? I am sure there would be a market for them.

Instead of completed items I brought lots of my technical samples for them to examine, they could choose any techniques they would like to learn and I asked them to make something that could be carried on the body without using the hands to hold whatever they made. We only had two days to work in and at the end of the second day the makers performed a catwalk wearing their creations. Antonios  plaited palmito nose cone for stabbing flies whilst working was just one of many gems!

As always it was a real pleasure to be in the company of fellow makers and my thanks to Josep and the Catalan Basketmakers for inviting me to share some time with them, to Idoia and Severine for translations from French to Spanish, to Mari for taking photos and setting up a Whats app group, to Carles, Francoise, Julio and many others for cooking skills, Magda for the lift to the station and to all of them for ‘playing’ and experimenting.

Dordogne, Berkshire, Catalonia (Part 2 Berkshire)

Shetland kishie in MERL collection (atypical base)

From Perigueux to Reading for a symposium about endangered baskets, organised jointly by the Heritage Crafts Association, the Basketmakers’ Association and the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers and hosted at the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University. The event was fully booked and apparently the same number of people had to be turned away due to lack of space, which was a shame. The aim was to try to develop a strategy for saving the knowledge of those baskets that are considered to be in danger of disappearing and to that end four of us gave talks. My talk was about the Shetland kishie, Mary Butcher spoke about several English basket forms and techniques that are in danger, Hilary Burns about the research that she has been conducting into English basketry over many years, Stephanie Bunn about the considerable work that she has done with Woven Communities for the Scottish Tradition and Jenny Crisp on the lack of more formal education for willow cultivation as well as basket making skills.

 Kishie, Cullivoe, Yell (typical)

At lunchtime we had an opportunity to look at baskets in the museum store. There are two straw kishies in the collection from Shetland but neither are typical because the bases are quite different to most of the ones I have seen in Shetland.

In the afternoon we broke into groups to discuss various topics. The group I found myself in had sustainability as its theme and included several professional willow growers who outlined the many problems they face. I was not surprised to hear one grower admit to using banned chemicals on his willow crop because he grows vast monocultures of Black Maul. I know I have been banging on about this for years and making myself unpopular in the process, but it’s still going on.  It’s the total disconnect between people and place that results in individual basketmakers working with materials that they have not harvested or grown themselves and I suppose it  must be the profit motive that makes commercial willow growers destroy their landscape and environment to satisfy their market. According to one grower, a large amount of sales are to people who are weaving  sculptures and coffins, both of which require huge amounts of willow. At least one grower even imports willow from Eastern Europe to satisfy this market. A willow coffin or basket made with chemically sprayed willows may be a ‘natural’ product but it is certainly not an environmentally friendly or a sustainable one.

In front of a monocultural plantation of Black Maul in Somerset 1982 - little has changed.

Chemical pesticides and fungicides were first available to farmers on a large scale in the 1950’s. Britains basket industry was at its biggest and most profitable prior to that in the early 20thCentury when thousands of willow baskets were being made for all sorts of purposes. They achieved this without the aid of Monsanto, ICI, Bayer, et al and I see no reason why it cannot be done again. 

London basketmakers  A.Cook  1935

When you think about it, it is obvious that any willow plantation is going to be vulnerable to pests and diseases because we plant the willows in lines bang up next to each other to make them grow straight, we then force them to make lots of new shoots by chopping their heads off every year, we seldom fertilise and we tend to plant single varieties which means that if one gets infested they all do. Added to this heavy tractors instead of lightweight horses are now used to cut (and spray) the willows on large plantations thus compacting the soil round the roots, so it’s no wonder the willows give up after 10 years or so of this onslaught. It’s time to re think the whole business of growing willow as a crop, there has to be a better way. I have read that there is a bacteria that can kill rust on willows and any other infected plants that is completely harmless to the environment or man, but I imagine it is not that easy to get hold of because one of the big chemical companies will have made sure they have the patent or they will have buried the research!

It was good to have a chance to discuss these things and to catch up with friends and fellow makers and to meet some people I had only previously ‘met’ on social media.

Hopefully a comprehensive strategy for documenting some of our endangered baskets that are languishing in national Museum stores will emerge from this event along with other activities to preserve the knowledge stored in these baskets. My thanks to Mary Lewis at Heritage Crafts for inviting me to contribute to the day. It was certainly food for thought.

Toxic Basketry

Dyed cane and willow wastepaper bins, early 90's

Students and fellow basket makers often tell me that they only like to work with ‘natural’ materials.

These are people who are also genuinely concerned about the environment and about ethical production methods. This makes it all the more surprising to me to discover that some of them buy natural materials to make baskets with that are in fact highly processed in one way or another and often have both environmental and ethical problems associated with this processing.

Firstly, I am not in any way suggesting these people are being devious or dishonest. In fact I think most of them genuinely believe that they are using natural, sustainable and environmentally sound materials when they purchase them on line because that is how they are being marketed. If you have never visited a commercial willow grower, that doesn't grow organically go in late spring and you will discover how unenvironmentally friendly it can be.

Commercial willow cultivation 

Willow is a ‘natural’ environmentally friendly product in itself, it is how it is grown and processed that is the problem. In much of Europe a lot of the big commercial willow growers still use a lot of herbicides and pesticides because they grow many hectares in monocultures, consequently they cannot control weeds or insect attacks without resorting to chemical warfare. But it isn’t just the growing, in order to ship natural materials it is often necessary to spray them with fungicide.

On one of my visits to one of the bigger willow growers in Somerset, I was presented with the sight of a worker in the yard spraying willow fencing panels with fungicide, prior to their shipment abroad. The man doing the spraying had some protection against the spray but the weavers of the panels, totally unprotected in their normal clothing, were working in the same mist in an open sided shed no more than 10 metres away from the spraying. It was 16 years ago and I hope very much that this sort of thing doesn’t happen now. I am sure that many of the customers who bought willows or fencing panels from this grower at the time had no idea that this sort of thing went on because their marketing only spoke about their lovely ‘natural’ product.

But things are changing in the commercial willow world, at last, and there are an increasing number of growers who do it without resorting to chemicals and who manage to make a living at it. 

Dyed cane and found netting 1984

The last cane baskets 1984

Things are not however so good in the world of rattan. I know quite a bit about rattan because when I started making baskets I used a lot of it in its highly processed form known in Britain as ‘centre cane’ and in America as ‘reed’(France 'rotin', Germany 'pedigrohr') I even wrote a book featuring ‘centre cane’ techniques. It had lots of advantages for me as a city dweller, I could purchase it easily, I could dye it any colour I wanted, I could store it easily, soaking only took a few minutes and could be in done in a small bowl. All of these qualities also made it very easy to use in the classroom and students could learn many different techniques with this versatile spaghetti like material. It was and remains in some places a popular material for use in occupational therapy for all the same reasons. Its been imported to Europe for centuries and in Britain after the first world war many convalescing soldiers were taught to make baskets using it, which apparently aided their recovery.

David Drew

Despite all these advantages it was meeting David Drew in the 1980’s who grew his own organic willows in his garden for his beautiful baskets that had a profound influence on my thinking about the materials I was using and the ethical and environmental problems involved in rattan processing. That coupled with the realisation of the part I was playing in this story by my purchasing it from the other side of the globe and dyeing it with fibre reactive dyes convinced me I had to stop using it which I did in the early 90's.

For a while centre cane seemed to have gone out of fashion with basket makers in Europe, though its use in America has stayed fairly strong. But recently there has been a rash of it cropping up all over social media and being used by young makers. I thought that maybe now it is all being grown sustainably and the use of diesel oil and chemicals in the curing process has all been stopped, because otherwise why would these people be using it? So I did some research and what I found is that whilst there is an increased awareness of the environmental and health and safety problems at a governmental and NGO level there has been little progress on improving the situation for all sorts of interconnected reasons.

Calamus (rattan) is a jungle creeper that has traditionally been harvested from virgin forest in south East Asia and more recently Africa which, due to high demand for the product for the furniture industry has caused a lot of problems ecologically and shortages in some places. Rattan palms are slow growing not arriving at a productive harvest size for 12 years. So the idea of creating managed plantations was apparently a good solution to the problem of over harvesting, except that the land needed for a rattan plantation is equally suitable for an oil palm plantation. Oil palm is more profitable so the enthusiasm for planting rattan gardens as they are known has waned and harvesting from the wild remains the modus operandi.

IKEA in conjunction with the WWF have been instrumental in encouraging sustainable plantations in Vietnam and they have also implemented health and safety procedures in the few workshops that they work with directly. The problem however goes far beyond their control because there are not enough ‘sustainable’ rattan plantations to meet the needs of all the furniture manufacturers that want it.

Another major problem with rattan is the processing which includes 'curing' the rattan. Curing is considered to be a necessary process to kill insects and stop moulds developing in the moisture laden air of the places where it grows. It is done by steeping the rattan in boiling diesel oil. The problem here is that because many of the communities where this is done are very poor they often employ used diesel and cannot afford the face masks and protective clothing that are needed to protect themselves from this highly toxic activity. There are quite a few videos on the web of rattan processing plants made by the companies doing the processing but few showing the diesel boiling process though on some you can see the blue smoke coming out of sheds in the background, (of course they might just be burning lunch but I doubt it.) However on some tourist videos it is possible to see people working with the boiling tanks wearing no masks or other protection. Another process that is often recommended is to sulphur the rattan immediately after harvesting to stop moulds developing that discolour the canes. A similar process to that used for whitening willow can be employed but they have discovered that a more effective method is to soak the canes in a sulphur solution which give off far more toxic fumes than the dry method. Not only is this bad news for the workers but both the diesel and the sulphur have to be disposed of at some point and apparently much of the residue ends up in the local water source.

Despite considerable time spent researching this issue I have been unable to find a source of genuinely sustainable centre cane/ reed for basket making. If anyone knows of one please tell me about it and I will be happy to promote it.



In the meantime, developing a close relationship with your materials by gathering or growing your own is still the easiest way to be sure that you are working sustainably. It also makes your work unique to you and your environment, it uses no air miles, endangers no one else’s health or well being and costs nothing. What's not to like?

Grass and Water

Over the last couple of months I have been walking in the surrounding countryside to get some exercise.  A  back problem has prevented me from doing any proper sport for over a year now and I think my tennis life is finally over. It was possibly the cause of all the bother in the first place and I can't just play tennis for 'fun'.... what is the point?

The bi-product of these walks has been the gathering of grasses and anything else that looks workable, like docks, plantains and wild oats.  Grasses are a whole new field of botany for me. I lived in London for 30 years where the only grass I saw was mown to within an inch of its life in a public park. So, my general rule of thumb for gathering the stuff has been, if I like the look of it I cut some.  There is a purple grass that grows in a dried out reservoir by the railway line that was stunning when I cut it first. But it has dried now and although it still has a hint of purple  it is very much less attractive.  It  seems to me that in basket making with natural materials  everything always ends up, ultimately, in the brown spectrum, which is probably why, on the whole, I prefer  unnatural materials!

But, it has been  good exercise gathering the, soon to be, brown stuff  and the back is almost back to normal with the combination of a daily massage, walking and the 'water cure'.

Looking for a natural cure for the massage god's  allergic asthma I hit on the 'water cure' and as the web site suggested that it works for almost anything and it costs nothing to do, we both gave it a try. He hasn't wheezed since and my back is feeling way way better.  Is it a coincidence  that plants and humans  both function better when they are hydrated? The grass is certainly greener when it is growing.

Free Materials

Free materials are everywhere but occasionally I have to actively look for them  in order to see them. This week I have been walking every day to try and help my body cure itself of a chronic back problem and I always take a bag and some secateurs. The bag is for free food (15 walnuts and  8 figs yesterday) and the secateurs for free materials.

I have been spending part of my time in this little French village for many years and  over that time I have walked down every path and track in and around the commune plenty of times. But, it was only this year that I noticed not more than 100 metres from my house these clumps of rush in a fallow field. The village is almost at sea level and this field is a little below that which means that the water table is very high and the land can flood. I cannot recall the field ever having been used for crops or animals but I have never, ever, noticed the rushes before, perhaps they weren't there before, but I suspect that they were .......

They are a variety of Juncus effusus but not quite the same as the ones that grow in Shetland which are fatter. These rushes  also have quite distinct vertical ridges which are not so evident on the Shetland ones.
In June I cut some which dried a  grey green colour and were lovely to work with. The field was then cut by the owner and I thought that would be it for the year but now the clumps are about a metre high again so, yesterday, I cut some more.

North Atlantic Drift

This is the title  I have given to the piece that I made for the group show This Beloved Earth which opened yesterday at the Barony Centre in West Kilbride, Scotland and will remain on show until the 23rd November.

It is in fact 35  baskets made only  from materials gathered from the shores and banks on the island of Yell in Shetland,  most of it from within fifty metres of the house where I stay. The ropes were washed and some of them separated to make new  finer twisted threads for stitching.   The stitches that I have used are only those seen on baskets that were made and used in Shetland. The broken buoys and other bits of ceramic and plastic were drilled but otherwise left as they were found. The grasses and oats were just gathered and dried.

Kirkabister

The quantity of rope and plastic washed up on the beaches of the islands  is astonishing, much of it almost new and obviously jettisoned by commercial fishing boats. A lot of it has travelled  many miles in the Atlantic along both the North Atlantic Drift and the Gulf Stream to arrive on the foreshore  at the head of Mid Yell Voe and from where there is nowhere further for it to go. There are  plastic mussel pegs and ropes (aka droppers) rubber gloves and wellington boots, bicycle helmets, hard hats, blue chemical drums, buoys, floats, netting and the ubiquitous yellow fish crates belonging to LHD. Whole crates tend to find their way back into use, somehow or another, but broken ones just sit there waiting for the Voar Redd Upp when the locals armed with bin bags will gather as much as they can.

 LW and JJIB 2013, Mid Yell Voe

Camb

Brekkon

Camb

In the past the people of the islands were expert at beach-combing and at making the most of anything that arrived in this haphazard but free way. Shipwrecks were an opportunity to acquire things undreamed of any other way and many houses had roof timbers and furniture that had once been part of a ship. Now people can have anything they want delivered to their homes in the islands and there is little interest in scavenging along the shore. New houses are often built without chimneys so even gathering driftwood is of little interest. There was  a time before organised waste collection where any crockery or glass that got broken in the home was just chucked into the Voe and there are plenty of stories of tractors and cars being disposed of in the same way. For me, this jetsam provides a myriad of material choices  but apparently most tourists would prefer not to have to look at these things,  it is one of the few complaints that visitors make to the Islands tourist board.  For the wildlife this jetsam is just dangerous, birds, seals and otters get tangled in nets and ropes and choke on bits of plastic that they mistake for food.

This sentinelle on a path leading to one of the Atlantic beaches in France visually sums up the long term problem that these things cause.Waste disposal in a consumer economy is fraught with environmental dilemmas but dumping rope and  fish crates into the sea is just a lazy solution to a difficult problem.

Stripping

Just to show you that I do still like willow..... I have been 'stripping' it this week. Actually it is one of my favourite willow activities because you end up with two beautiful end products, the white rod and the bark which have totally different characteristics.

There is something very satisfying about the physical task of pulling the willow through the brake and feeling the bark slide off in two neat ribbons. It is also outdoor work and can be sociable if you get someone to help. In willow growing regions of Britain at the end of the 19th Century beginning of the 20th, whole villages turned out to strip the willow because the time frame is fairly short. The sap rises and separates the layers then, as the weeks go by, it starts to adhere to the heartwood and becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible to peel.  It was accepted that children would not be at school during those weeks and although the work was hard you get the impression from old photos that it was fun too. The first photo came from the Devon County archives but I have no information about where the photo was taken, it could have been Devon or Somerset or possibly East Anglia given the eel traps and style of building.
The second one was taken in Spalding Lincolnshire in about 1910.

Illustration from Baskets and Basketmaking by Alastair Heseltine ISBN 0852636113

Usually I 'pit' the willows I am going to strip, cutting them in the winter when they are dormant and standing them in shallow water where they grow fine water roots. I then strip them when the leaves are bursting out, normally about May.

This year I decided it wasn't necessary as I had a good stock of white willow that I haven't found a use for yet. But there were some willows in the plot I hadn't cut when they were dormant  and now they are coming into leaf. As they are 'Jaune', which make a really good creamy white willow, I thought I would try stripping them and it worked really well. As it was a sunny day they dried very quickly in the sun and I have never had such dazzling white willows before. Obviously timing is critical and you have to strip them almost as soon as you have cut them. I left a few with their butts standing in water overnight but because they had no roots by the next day the sap had dropped and they wouldn't peel.

Illustration from Basketmaking in Bedfordshire by TW Bagshawe ISBN 0 907106003

My willow brake I bought because I liked the shape, but its not a good design because you have to fix it to something in order to use it. Better ones have a spike at the base of the circle that you can stick in a handy post, tree stump or crevice in a wall . Hence my arrangement with a screw block and clamps. David Drew made one for me out of a length of chestnut, note the discreet signature. It is kinder on the willow than the steel but is intended for use on a saw horse which clamps it in place and is not so easy to use without the horse.

"Strip the Willow" is also the name of an old British folk tune and dance. Bizarrely there are Orcadian and Shetland versions even though willow was never a native plant in Shetland and they certainly never had enough to strip ! You can see some Scottish experts perform it here.

Anything But Willow!

Last night I burned most of the hundred plus willow experiments I made for my research at the RCA and it was good, it warmed the room for a short period of time and felt like a little act of revolt against the stuff.

Willow has been an important part of my life; I have grown it, made lots of things with it and devoted four years of my life to researching it.  But, for some time now I have been jokingly saying to friends that I will set up a facebook page called Anything But Willow !

Of course, I mean no disrespect to the plant or the many friends and colleagues who make lovely things with willow, so why do I feel like this? Because it seems to me that in parts of Northern Europe, at least, we have become infatuated with it to the exclusion of lots of other wonderful natural materials and that by not using these other materials we are losing the knowledge of how to work with them. 

A quick analysis of the workshops and courses on offer at the moment by the English, Scottish and Danish Basketmakers associations shows that willow predominates. It also shows that there is very little instruction on offer for its cultivation . In the latest Basketmakers Association newsletter, however, there are just over a hundred courses on offer of which more than 90 include weaving with willow.

It is easy to buy a bundle of commercially grown willow. It is a good way for people to learn how to make a basket without having to deal with the often difficult and time consuming, yet very important part of basket making, which is gathering and preparing the material. But, it has always seemed to me that if you don’t enjoy preparing the materials you probably won’t ever really like making baskets. The materials need preparation, whatever they are, and that preparation can often take longer than making the basket so you really need to enjoy that part of the process as well as the weaving bit.

gathering wild oats

Basket making used to be done by the people who needed the basketry for their day to day existence. They used whatever material they had in their vicinity and managed it sustainably, knowing that if they didn’t there wouldn’t be any of it there next year. They knew everything about the growth cycle, how and when to harvest it and how to prepare it for use. Now we can order a bolt of willow on line without really knowing anything about how it became this beautiful, even bundle of rods and the various processes that have to be undertaken at precise times of the year for it to arrive on our doorstep whenever we want it.  It's a bit like  buying strawberries from a supermarket in December that have been flown in from the southern hemisphere and willow can  have an equally heavy ecological footprint as that of the  strawberries, if it hasn’t been grown organically.

iris and gladioli leaves

There is an astonishing richness of natural materials available to us in Northern Europe to make baskets with. But why are there so few classes in using straw, wild clematis, dock stalks, hazel, ash or some of the myriad varieties of shrubs, trees, rushes and grasses that are everywhere in our countryside for us to use for free? Not forgetting the even more varied range of materials that can be ‘harvested’ for free in our cities or on our beaches.

 The classes aren’t there because there are only a few people capable of teaching us how to use these materials.  Much of this knowledge has not been handed down and is now lost. So it’s a chicken and egg situation, there may be lots of people who want to learn how to make baskets but the only courses they can go on are for willow. So that is what they learn, often unaware that there are many other materials that you can make baskets with.

wild clematis

However, something has happened recently that may alter things. The French magazine Le Lien Creatif has arrived on the scene. This magazine devoted to basket making is turning into a superb resource for learning about all the other natural materials there are out there that can be used for basket making.  Fortunately in France there are still some elderly makers who specialise in materials other than willow and Bernard Bertrand, the editor who  is the  hero in all this, is doing his best to track them all down to  record and publish as much of their precious knowledge as he can. It’s a Herculean task that he has taken on, but worth it because each magazine is richer than the previous one. Even if you don’t read French there are many step by step instructions for material gathering and preparation as well as  basket construction.  Bernard is hoping to produce an English version of the magazine either on line or in print. So, if anyone reading this is in the publishing business and is interested in helping to get an English version off the ground please contact Bernard at the magazine. Hopefully if enough people get to see Le Lien Creatif some might get excited by these other forgotten materials and in a few years time there will be many more classes using other materials.

In truth, I burnt the willow samples because the brown willow had become riddled with woodworm but that is just one of many reasons why willow is not the only and most perfect material to make baskets with – woodworm love it!

Weaving with Hands and Feet

Brandbjerg Hojskole near Jelling in Denmark was the setting for Flettetraef last week. This is the name given to the week-long biennial summer school run by Pileforeningen the Danish basket makers association. Topics this year were, the ubiquitous, cultivated willow and the increasingly popular willow bark employed in various ways, along with  rush and cardboard.

There were 10 tutors and about 90 participants, most of which were female and the majority over 35. So, really, it’s a kind of retreat for women, where they can escape their families and be fed, both physically and mentally, without having to do any shopping, washing, or washing up. There I met many strong women who have had plenty of very tough things to deal with in their lives but who smiled for most of the week. It cannot be a bad thing.

My students, like all the others, worked like crazy. I could see the light on in our workshop after 11pm most nights as they pushed themselves into new territory, wrestling with strips of cardboard and discovering things about it, and perhaps themselves, they hadn’t found before.

But the week was not just basket making. There were also  guided nature walks, keep fit classes, a trip to the royal burial mounds in Jelling, talks, meditation, communal singing and dancing, a fair on the Wednesday afternoon where you could buy books and baskets and materials, an exhibition of the students work and an end of week party.  Of course, all of this takes a huge amount of voluntary organisation by many people, but particularly in this instance by Else Marie Pedersen , Solveig Langballe and Suzanne Kampp for whom it had been two years in the planning and to whom everyone involved was extremely grateful.

All the  activities  I have mentioned  were of course  pre-programmed but on the final night we were given an extra curricula treat.

Whilst the basket makers occupied most of the building there was also another much smaller group staying at Brandbjerg who were either  learning, or practicing, Argentinian Tango, I’m not sure which. We hardly saw them all week but they were invited to come to the exhibition of our students work and after the celebration dinner their tutor gave  us a short talk about the origins of the dance and an explanation of the differences between Argentinian Tango and the more macho European version. His students then offered to put on a performance for us. Slightly overawed by the large audience and somewhat shyly they danced for us and in so doing gave something of themselves to us. It was a gesture that many of us found profoundly touching. I only had my phone with me so the quality is not good but you can see a short clip of one of the performances here.