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.

Woven Communities in Shetland

Ewen Balfour working with the children at Urufirth 

Stephanie Bunn  at the University of St. Andrews  is the driving force behind the Woven Communitites Project ,which  has been going for a few years now. Its main aim is to document the materials, techniques,  people and  places  that were  all part of the vernacular basketry of Scotland. Through  its symposia and other activities the Project also includes contemporary international  practice and methodologies in the discussion.

This summer Stephanie, along with  Dawn Susan, Julie  Gurr and Liz Balfour,  has been visiting Museums in the Highlands and Islands, documenting objects meeting elders and organising events.
The Shetland Museum was one of the partner organisations and Ian Tait, the Director  of the Shetland Museum, invited myself and Ewen Balfour  to be involved in the Woven Communities activities that were being organised by  Kirsty and Yvonne, the Museums Education team,  in Shetland schools.  I happily accepted, though not without some trepidation, because it has been a while since I have done any work in schools.

Simmens 'makkin' at Urufirth

In the end the programme that was divised between us all worked  well.  Ian started with a talk about the Shetland basketry tradition, this was followed by Ewen who taught the pupils how to make simmens (rope) with floss ( Juncus effusis) and then showed them how  the simmens were used for making  kishies. Stephanie told the children about the Woven Communities Project and it was my task to  re-enforce the simmens making, but with bits of found ghost rope pieces, that we then tied or stitched into baskets. Stephanie documented the activities in all the schools on video.

Whalsay pupils and their baskets made from found materials

Locals were invited to come in with any baskets that they had at home and in Unst we had several visitors come to the school with lovely kishies.

Child size kishies made some years ago on Unst

My co-workers, the schools, their teachers and the children were all a pleasure to work with and seemed to genuinely enjoy their immersion. A session at Urufirth was made very special by the children bursting into spontaneous singing, whilst working.

If we do not work with children we cannot expect any of these traditional skills to survive. So for me it was a positive and rewarding experience to know that as a result of this project at least 30 children aged between 7 and 13, who knew little or nothing about the tradition of basket making in Shetland, now know a lot more and are capable of making  a small coiled basket and simmens in various materials.

For those interested there is a second Woven Communities symposium being organised by  Stephanie at St. Andrews for January 2017. Details will be being published soon, so check the Woven Communities Facebook page if you are interested in attending.

Willows and Widdies

Some of my living willow experiments at Kew Gardens 2002

When I embarked on doctoral research at the Royal College of Art in London 1999 I had no idea really what research was about. I knew at some base level that it involved ‘finding out things’ but how that was to be achieved was a complete mystery to me. I just assumed it involved reading books and asking questions and then compiling it all into something meaningful. Four years later, thanks to the support provided by the College, I had a far better idea of what it was.  One of  the things that I learned is that academic research is pretty similar to the research one does as an artist and can be equally as exciting.

You have to start somewhere and that starting point is often just a question that you ask yourself. In my studio, it is often  ‘what can I do with this material?  But you quickly discover that in order to answer this question you have to re phrase it a million times. This is because the first question you came up with doesn’t get you the information you think you want, or need, and the information it has provided isn’t as interesting as maybe you hoped it would be. So my question to myself in the studio might then change to ‘what can I do with this material if I combine it with this technique?’ and then ‘what can I do if I combine this material with another material and this technique? It is not always quite as clear-cut as this but I hope you get the idea.

Current studio research - 'how can I join ceramics and wire'?

But, just as you think your question is starting to get the answers you hoped for, an even more interesting thing starts to happen. The research takes over and leads you to all sorts of places you never imagined going to. Before long, you have discovered the answer to a question, but it isn’t to the one you asked in the first place and is in fact often far more interesting than that original question. This explains why one of the first things  you are told when you embark on academic research, is that the abstract  (which outlines your enquiry and which goes at the front of your essay or thesis) cannot be written until you  have finished the research ! This is often one of the hardest things for the research student to accept because right from childhood we learn that questions come before answers!

I eventually  found some answers to my questions,  wrote them down in the right order and completed my doctorate in 2003. It was about willow product design and manufacture and if you are interested  it is available to download from the British Library.

It is possible, however, that research may be addictive because I have now started again, this time into the Shetland basket making tradition. It seemed to me that there might be more to it than the scarce amount of printed information suggests. I don’t necessarily mean more in terms of variety of techniques and raw materials, but more in terms of how particular forms developed and how because of the location, ecology and inhabitants of the place it became very individual and particular to the islands.

The first time I went to the old Shetland Museum, (since 2007 there has been a lovely, shiny new one) I saw a black and white photo of a woman with a back basket. The title was ‘Woman with Willow Kishie’. The photo was very clear and it was immediately obvious to me that the kishie was not willow at all, it was rattan. My immediate assumption was that whoever had written the label didn’t know the difference between the two materials and had, out of ignorance, made a mistake!

Willow Kishie

But, in fact, the label on the photo was not a mistake. This particular basket was, and always has been, known locally as a ‘willow kishie’ even though it was never made out of willow. You could say that the first person to call it  such made a mistake but did they?  It seems possible that they just used a word that would distinguish this kishie from a straw kishie and they used the word willow because they may have heard it  used for baskets that aren’t made of  indigenous materials.  Although some varieties of Salix grow in Shetland, there is scarce evidence that it was ever used for basket making and they are called 'widdies'. If the sheep couldn’t get at them (they love chewing the bark off) 'widdies' were used to dye wool.   As a consequence  the word ‘willow’ in Shetland  dialect has come to mean a material for basket making that doesn’t grow there rather than a member of the Salix family.

I cannot speak Shetland dialect, I only know a few words and phrases. So it was very nice to have Barbara Ridland, a local textile artist come to the Shetland Museum stores with me to look at some of the baskets in the collection back in March. The first stage of this particular bit of research was for me to look at the collection database and conduct a search using all the words that I thought might bring up the objects that I would like to see. It is possible that I missed out some things by not being thorough enough in this initial search, (methodology and rigour are two words that come up a lot in academic research!) A lot of the dialect words for particular baskets were spelt differently by the different people who had input the data.  This is inevitable with an oral dialect like Shetlandic  but it makes it difficult for the database search mechanism unless it has been very carefully designed to take account of these variations. Unfortuantely few of the baskets have been photographed for the database, so it wasn’t possible for me to use images as an extra filter. (I have given the museum copies of the photos I took for them to use on the database so it should be a bit easier for the next person looking at baskets). Once this initial search of the database was done I drew up a list of the things I wanted to see with their acquisition number and location reference so that Jenny Murray the head of the the Collection could locate the objects easily. That done Barbara and I went  to the Museum store for two days and Jenny and Helen brought objects out of the freezing cold store for us to unwrap examine and photograph.

 It was at this point that the research started to take over. Whilst Jenny and Helen were in the store getting the things I had asked for, they would spot others on the shelves  that they thought we might be interested in but which had not come up via the database search.  It was some of these objects that both Barbara and I enjoyed seeing the most.  This simple besom made of bent is one example.

I cannot forget Jenny saying as she entered the room at the end of one of the days carrying a tissue wrapped package  “I know you are going to love this”. We both did, because it was a little twisted and plaited doll made from oat straw that in Shetland dialect was called a “duckie” (there is an image of her on the Wintering in Shetland post). Here then is another word used in Shetland  that in another place means something else altogether.

If you want to know more about traditional Scottish baskets  and the materials they were made of Woven Communities  is a new website  recently  created through a collaboration between academia, museums and basket makers. It should be the first port of call for anyone doing research on the subject. 

Wintering in Shetland

Wintering in Shetland is becoming a habit. It is an exciting place to be at this time of year because Shetland folk spend a lot of time partying, dressing up as Vikings and setting light to things. It’s as though life is on speed. The skies and weather change so fast sometimes there are four seasons in a morning and the astonishing rate at which the days start to lengthen in February give hope to someone like me who finds dark mornings deadly. People who have never been to Shetland imagine it to be a cold place because it is on latitude 60. But, the Gulf Stream laps around the islands and during most of January and February it was a few degrees warmer than the south of England. 

It is an unforgiving, but very beautiful place at any time of the year. But, on the surprisingly many still and sunny winter days, there are breathtaking reflections of skies and sunsets on the voe. There is also a glassy sea to peer into where there is a world one is not normally privileged to see without a snorkel.  Seals barely stir the water when they poke their heads up to check you out. Being  curious they track your progress along the shore and  if you stand still they will pop up and down getting ever closer until they decide you are not that interesting after all. Then the faint ripple of their movement on the surface of the water tells you they have gone.

Shetland always inspires me to work  and I usually make some things for the house. This time it was some more table mats out of beach rope, a chest from driftwood to store bedding (a joint project with the ‘woodwork god’) and another laundry basket from a buoy. The house is let to visitors in the summer and I always hope they will enjoy using  these hand made items as much as we enjoy making them.

I also resolved a piece that I had previously exhibited but was unhappy with.  In fact,  it had been folded in half and put  in the dustbin, I didn’t have the heart to unpick my painstaking work. As I turned away from the dustbin I saw a rusty metal ring close by that I had rescued from the beach and knew straight away that I had the solution.  This phenomenon happens quite often to me and is a bit like the tennis player who is tense and making lots of errors and consequently losing badly. The player then apparently gives up and ceases worrying about trying to win.  Suddenly with the brain allowed to stop fretting it all comes together.

But, I have very little space to work in when I am in Shetland, so I mainly occupy myself teaching and researching the indigenous basket making tradition. Each time I learn a bit more and discover that what at first seemed to be one that is quite limited is in fact far richer than I ever imagined. It is also a tradition of careful and meticulous craft, nothing hurried or slapdash and  a supreme demonstration of how to exploit fully whatever material you have available.  I will write about my recent research in more detail later but as a taster here is a rather lovely little “duckie”.

Straws in the Wind

Coiled Shetland oat straw basket made by Jimmy Work

Oats were the staple grain in the Shetland Islands prior to the 20^th Century and as in all rural communities at that time their use was completely sustainable, nothing was wasted. The threshed grain used for porridge, flour and animal feed was ground by small water mills set in the burns. The remaining straws were then used for things such as  roofing, stuffing mattresses, wrapping the feet in cold weather, mats for threshing, animal bedding and costumes for festivals. And, as in so many other rural communities all over the world they were also used for making baskets.

Image taken from an old postcard showing large coiled straw basket 

These islands are thought to have been inhabited for at least 5000 years but there is little evidence to suggest that there was ever a strong tradition of weaving with woody plants. There used to be trees in Shetland but they disappeared a long time ago, so for centuries there were few indigenous materials for basket making, little willow or hazel, certainly no oaks, ashes or chestnuts. Consequently the baskets of these islands had to be made with the native materials that could be gleaned or grown, such as oats, dockens, bent, rushes and heather.There was no riving, skeining or plaiting of anything tree or bark like, just the softer more textile tradition of twining, and for sturdier items, coiling. No axes or woodworkers 'donkeys' were involved just hands and pocket knives and bone or driftwood needles.

The Shetland Islands have a long tradition of spinning, knitting and weaving the fine wool that the indigenous sheep provide. This was the job of the women; basket making was the domain of the men and was an activity for the winter when the weather and short days forced them indoors.

The oats that grew here in the 19^th and 20^th Century here were different. They were fine and  stayed green and softer for longer making them ideal for basket making unlike the nitrogen-fuelled cereals  of today,  bruisers by comparison, short, muscular, and brittle. Now there are few people who grow these oats and those that do provide specialist needs such as value added local oatcakes, the roofing of a few listed buildings and the last semi-professional basket-maker Jimmy Work who only uses Shetland oats.

Jimmy Work in his 'real' indoor  work place 

Jimmy and selection of his baskets in  a 'staged' work place made for  a 1998 Calendar .
Photograph by Bill Jackson  for The Shetland Times.

Jimmy started making baskets in 1958 and he hasn't stopped. He says he taught himself and today at 88 he still makes the fine simple elegant coiled baskets that have become his trade mark. These are not traditional agricultural baskets like the kishie or fishing baskets such as the budie, these are domestic baskets for laundry and knitting, to hold peats by the fire. These are 1960's post herring trade, oil boom baskets used to decorate the home with in a much less hard and more leisurely life.

Jimmy has made hundreds of them, he doesn't know how many, and they have been sent to all parts of the world - he is a one man industry. His hobby, for that is what it is, has created a tradition and people come from all over to film him, talk to him and buy his baskets. Jimmy sells everything he makes and selling them is very important to him, he has little time for people that visit and do not buy! Most of his working life he spent painting and decorating for a building contractor, with his basket making almost a second job. He worked at it for an hour in the morning prior to the day job and several hours in the evening on his return home after a long day with the paint brush.

Jimmy says he can always recognise his baskets because he makes them without adding extra lines of stitching on the sides. There is the same number of stitches at the edge of the base as at the top edge regardless of any outward flow of the form. They are beautifully crafted, sturdy, functional and elegant baskets. He has never had any desire to alter his technique or his materials and it is probably because he has always made them the same way that they are so good.

Base of the basket

I asked Jimmy if he had ever taught anyone else to make them. I had heard whispers on the wind that he had refused to teach a woman who had offered to pay him for tuition. Apparently he told her that a woman would never have the strength to do it. I didn’t ask him if it was true, nor did I dare tell him I make baskets but I am very glad to hear that he is now passing on his precious knowledge to a couple of people – both male!  

Skeklers Hats

Lerwick Up Helly Aa 2012

Guizing is an important part of cultural life in the Shetland Islands. Nowadays it happens at Halloween, Newerday (New Year) and most famously at Lerwick Up Helly Aa on the 31^st January. In the past it also featured as part of wedding festivities.

'Guizing' is the Shetland verb for the art of disguising yourself in 'fancy dress' which now can be anything from 'Teletubbies' to Elvis impersonators.  Traditionally an activity for adult males and children of both sexes, it is now acceptable for women to participate in local guizing events. Lerwick Up Helly Aa, however, still remains the preserve of males.

 In the Northern parts of the Shetland Islands i.e North Mainland, Yell, Unst and Fetlar once dressed in your guizing outfit you became a “skekler”.  These slightly devilish creatures had licence on these special occasions to visit peoples homes and to say and do things that may or may not have been acceptable without the disguise. It is not hard to imagine that in some of these small and self contained communities, sometimes ruled with an iron hand by the landowners, it acted as an important  safety valve allowing resentments and frustrations to be expressed without reprisal. In some ways it appears to still perform the same role as at the halls at the winter fire festivities  guizers perform comic acts that poke fun at people who, in some way or another, might have offended or amused the community. There is no hiding place for the victims they just have to accept their critique, in the knowledge that they have an equal right to do the same to others.

Before the arrival of new materials and a money based culture, the skeklers costume comprised   a pointed hat decorated with ribbons, a cloak, skirt and leggings all of which were made out of oat straw.  Terry Gunnel, Professor in Folkloristics at the University of Iceland, is an expert on the guising traditions of this part of the world and  notes in his paper  "Grýla, Grýlur, "Grøleks" and Skeklers: Medieval Disguise Traditions in the North Atlantic?"Arv: Nordic Yearbook of Folklore, 57 (2001), 33-54. the last practical recorded complete skeklers outfit as having been seen on Fetlar in 1958. Consequently, for the opening of the the new Shetland Museum in 2007 Euan Balfour was  commissioned to recreate a skeklers  outfit based on information in photos and recordings in the archives as by then only two  skeklers hats were known to still exist in the islands.

Euan Balfours re-creation of a skeklers outfit in the Shetland Museum

One of these two hats was made by my great uncle Andrew Anderson for his daughter. Its a fine example decorated somewhat quirkily with neck ties! 

Skeklers hat made by Andrew Anderson.

So in a bid to revive the tradition and to help me understand the processes involved I decided to make one this year for the male in the house to wear out guizing in North a Voe. I had oat straw given to me by Hazel Gray who is one of the few to grow it now and I decided to use rope found on the beach for the weaving and plastic bags for the ribbons. Without the original in front of me I worked from memory and consequently had to redo a few bits but on the whole it worked out fine, if a little improvised.

The first house on the guizing route ( there were over 20 on the route and in each house a dram is taken!) belongs to Robert Williamson, aka Robert o’Camb, who it turns out used to be a dab hand at making skeklers hats though he hadn't done one for years. He spotted my version straight away and told the brave wearer that whilst it was 'no’ a bad effort ' it wasn't in the North a Voe tradition but that he would be happy to enlighten me. A subsequent visit to Robert filled in some more detail. It turns out that each community had different ways of making it, the most significant difference being whether it was intended to be worn over the face like this...... 

or with a veil covering the face. Uncle Andrews from Cullivoe was to be worn covering the face and the North a Voe variety with a veil. There are other differences but suffice to say, for the moment, that as with most things the “devil is in the detail”!

Robert Williamson wearing his North  a Voe  hat - without the traditional  veil.