'Urban Baskets' unpacked in North Wales

'Urban Baskets' opens this weekend at two venues in North Wales where it will be on show  until March 12th. The exhibition has been divided between the Denbigh and Ruthin Library Galleries and details of the opening hours can be found here.http://www.eventsnorthwales.co.uk/events/6899/lois-walpole--urbanbaskets-tradition-recycled

Sadly, I will not have a chance to visit either venue, or to run any workshops, due to the ongoing financial constraints that are currently squeezing the cultural life out of Britain so, if you have a chance to visit either venue please tell me about it!

Labyrinth

In a park in the little village of Nanteuil-en-Vallee is to be found this living willow labyrinth, it is one of the nicest I have seen, well maintained, sitting happily in the landscape and visually pleasing even on a grey winters day.


Although there was no sign to say who had created it, I guessed it was probably done by Joel Rouillé as he has become an expert at these constructions and runs a business based in Villaine Les Rochers undertaking a wide variety of commissions for public spaces.  I subsequently checked Joels website and found it there. http://www.joel-rouille-osier.com/ Joel  acknowledges that it was his neighbour  David Drew, the British basket maker, who  introduced this type of  diagonal woven living willow fence to France in 1994 when he planted one around the potager outside his troglodyte home in Villaines. This was in fact the second version as the first had been planted around his previous vegetable garden in Somerset.


The following year David and his wife Judy created a sensation at the International Garden Festival at Chaumont with a much larger version of this fence. Constructed of zig-zag willow walls using his now perfected technique and white gravel, it had a strong visual presence that altered with the seasons. The completed installation offered a unique experience to anyone entering between the walls and it became one of the most popular exhibits that year.  As a consequence of the publicity they received  the living willow fence is now a regular feature in  parks and gardens worldwide.

Image from a postcard of David and Judy Drews installation at Chaumont Garden Festival 1995.
Original photo:Yann Arthus Bertrand

The way that David makes them is as immaculate as topiary and he has developed his own techniques for their planting and pruning. This makes them distinct and aesthetically superb but there is a historical precedent for both diagonally woven fences and living woven fences. In medieval paintings, particularly of the Italian and Dutch Schools, there are often fences that look similar in construction but, despite some serious research, I have never tracked one down where the fence is obviously alive rather than constructed with dead sticks.  It is not difficult to imagine, however, that if the fence was planted in the ground from freshly cut wood there is every possibility that they were living fences.

More recently a German landscape designer Arthur Weichula (1865-1941) developed techniques for creating snow barrriers  for railway lines, bridges and buildings out of woven and grafted living wood (mainly poplar).  According to Konstantin Kirsch in his book Naturbauten aus lebenden Gehölzen (1996 ISBN 3-922201-17-2) Weichula not only ran a successful business creating living trellis fences, but he also published a book describing his techniques and successfully applied for patents for his tools and techniques.

Image taken from 'Grown Home an exploration of processes for the manufacture and culture of willow products' 2003 Lois Walpole

Medieval gardeners created their fences to keep animals in or out or to act as windbreaks for cultivated gardens. Arthur Weichula saw a practical and commercial  purpose for these fences but I feel sure they would all have also enjoyed the evolution of the diagonal living wood fence into something  that can also have a place in landscape design equal to that of topiary. Both plant and sculpture, Joel's Labyrinth is the successful result of a symbiotic relationship between man and nature where neither can exist without the other.

  

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!

Depressed, Pressed and the Press

Its been one of those weeks....a gallery that was apparently  interested in taking Urban baskets has, it seems, changed its mind, no reasons given - a pity because I thought it looked like a good space with an interesting programme. Then there is  the non payment of a teaching fee and related expenses  for a weeks work done nearly six months ago,  unfortunately  I hear I am not alone.....It's also been unseasonally cold and last night it snowed,  so to receive a good review of Urban Baskets came as welcome respite.

The marketing team at Walford Mill, Liz and Nicole, told me that they had met with 'severe apathy' when they tried to persuade journalists to make the journey from London,  where most of them are based, to Dorset to review Urban Baskets - even though they were offered encouragement in the form of train fares, lunches etc. Consequently  press coverage of the exhibition has, so far, been local and minimal but yesterday I received MUSE magazine from Christine at Walford which  had  a very nice review of the exhibition in it from someone who did not know my work previously.  If you click on the picture you can read the review.

Besom Season

Living in a small village you learn to recognise particular noises that tell you what is going on around you without actually needing to see what is happening. The post van accelerates fast up the road, it is about mid day and I am convinced that the French become more reckless the closer to lunchtime it gets. There is the dull, but nevertheless slightly sinister, thud of an arrow piercing a target when Daniel, over the road,  practices tir a l'arc - thankfully usually after lunch - and there is Anne-Marie gardening.....

I could not have a nicer neighbour than Anne-Marie who loves her garden and is a very knowledgeable gardener. To her the garden is an  extension of her pristine home that needs just as much housekeeping. Consequently she views overgrown lawns, weeds and the leaves that gently tumble from the trees at this time of year as a visible sign that she is failing as a housekeeper.

The lawn is dealt with in agri business fashion (as befits a farmers wife) with a sit on mower that sounds like a small tractor. When I hear its pistons cranking up and the blades reaching take off speed  I know that rain is forecast within 24 hours. But, the weeds on the gravel and the leaves on  the roads leading to her house need constant scratching and scraping and sweeping. Usually she uses a plastic leaf rake which has a distinctly plastic sound but yesterday  I was surprised to hear a new type of swishing  noise coming from the road and of course I had to investigate. My reward was to see Anne-Marie sweeping like a demon with a very obviously home-made besom, it doesn't take much to make me happy but this humble object gave me unadulterated joy! Apparently the plastic rake had broken.

Anne Marie doesn't know what particular plant she used but, traditionally in colder temperate climes besoms are made of birch or heather because they have the right amount of fine but resilient branches for the job.  In Nova Scotia according to Peter Barrs and Joleen Gordon in "Older Ways Traditional Nova Scotian Craftsmen" (ISBN0-442-29628-2) there used to be a tradition of 'sheen brooms' made from a single pole of yellow birch where, instead of the branches being used as the brush head, the wood is peeled away in layers or 'sheens' to create the brush fibres, leaving the unpeeled part as the handle.

Technically speaking  the 'Anne Marie special' is more correctly a 'swale' as it does not have a separate handle, this I discovered in the excellent " Encyclopedia of Green Wood Working" by Ray Tabor (ISBN 1-899233-07-5)

Of course, there are plenty of home made simple plant fibre brooms besoms and swales still being made and used all over the world but, it is rare now in northern Europe to find a person under retirement age who would think of making one for themselves, rather than spend their hard earned money buying something that will inevitably make someone higher up the food chain rich on the profit.

A plastic leaf rake costs about 20€ in my local 'garden centre'. Manufactured in China from planet munching materials it has probably been shipped to Europe on an ocean going skyscraper of metal boxes and I would need to work for at least an hour and a half (on the average French take home pay) to earn enough to buy one. Anne Marie thinks her swale does a superb job and it only took her about 15 minutes to cut the twigs from her hedgerow and bundle them with used baler twine which leaves her with a plus balance of 1 hour 15 minutes in her life account with which she can go and do something she really enjoys - which in her case is ironing!

The Numbers Game

Galleries and artistic venues that receive public funding usually have to justify their existence by proving that what they do is of some interest to the public.  It is, after all, that same public who provide the funding via their taxes so, I suppose it is only fair.

In order  to provide this proof galleries need to count heads, persuade people to sign visitors books and have  external evaluations and assessments done. The upside to this interminable bureacracy, which gobbles up time for gallery staff that could perhaps be more creatively employed, is that I now know that an estimated 6,380 people visited Walford Mill Crafts during the 6 weeks that "Urban baskets tradition recycled" was on compared with 2,796 during the same period last year. I have also seen a copy of  the visitors book (2 pages are pictured  above) and the "Artistic Assessment" by the Arts Council  all of which I was delighted to discover are very, very positive. In many ways I see myself more as a performer and educator  rather than as a merchant so applause, when it happens, is precious and is what  inspires me to continue.

Today the exhibition has been taken by van to North Wales where it will not be unpacked until mid January. It would have been nice if it could have gone to another venue in between but it wasn't easy finding venues that were prepared to host it. Recently it has become very difficult for artists/makers to find spaces in Britain that will support solo shows but these shows are very important because they allow us and others the space to reflect on our practise, which in turn enables us to move forward.Walford Mill Crafts is an exemplar in difficult times and if the attendance figures and visitor responses mean anything then I am relieved that the risk they took would appear to have paid off.

From the Cradle to the Grave

Whilst most of France is protesting at the prospect of having to work from the cradle to the grave I have been  taking  half-term visitors to look at churches, and have been reminded yet again of the essential role that baskets once played in our lives.

The Poitou Charentes is rich in Romanesque churches. These simple but solid limestone churches with intricately carved portals and capitols were mostly built in the 11th and 12th Century at a time when many of the  roads through the region were important pilgrim routes to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. At that time, it is said, an estimated two million  people a year made the journey from all over Europe in order to pay hommage to the relics of the apostle St. James. In order for me to travel  to the same place now by public transport I usually have to detour via Paris, Madrid or London. In medieval times I would have just picked up my staff,  for beating off wild dogs, put on my cape, slapped on the floppy hat adorned with the eponymous coquilles St Jacques and  turned left outside my front door arriving in Santiago some months later, no doubt  with sore feet, but having completed one half of an amazing and no doubt educative journey.

Many of the abbeys and village churches in this region were constructed at that time to offer spiritual encouragement and hospitality to the pilgrims in return for donations to the Church. The resultant construction boom must have seemed extraordinary to the inhabitants. It is tantalising to imagine what it would have been like for them to have a comparatively huge building site in the centre of every small village, with the noise of hammer on stone ringing all day for a hundred years or so as these gems of architecture were being constructed in an otherwise noise free environment.

One of the most notable of these beautiful churches is Notre Dame la Grande, in Poitiers, with a carved stone facade that is breathtaking for its detail. Just above the right hand doorway on the west facade is a 12th Century carving of a nativity scene (pictured above) with Mary showing the world her somewhat adult looking new born in his woven cradle overlooked by two animals which look, rather scarily, as though they might just eat him. The cradle is obviously wicker  and given the ecology of the region would probably have been woven from hazel, chestnut or willow.

Woven cradles seem to have been neglected by basket makers in recent years yet I am certain there are many parents who would much rather have a cradle hand made from sustainable materials than a machine made pvc one. The hand made cradle used to be an object of desire that families treasured and handed on to the next generation. It would seem to be a tradition that is ripe for revival and what could be better than making one yourself?

photo:Jonathan Middup

I was delighted therefore to be sent this picture by Pip Hall (who, by a very strange coincidence, is a stone carver www.piphall.co.uk ) of a 'moses' basket made from tetra paks. Pip participates in workshops started by Monica Tweddell in Cumbria which she calls 'crafty container' workshops because, she tells me, they were inspired by my book of the same name. This beautiful basket was made by Elizabeth Dawson, a fellow participant, for her neices son William and is plaited out of approximately 44 soya milk cartons.

Melle in Deux Sevres was considered such an important staging post on the pilgrim trail that three churches were built at about the same time each requiring a small army of masons and here high on a capitol in St. Pierre is a less detailed but nevertheless clear rendering of Jesus being laid in a woven coffin. (left)

The revival of the woven coffin in recent years has been, in my view, a  basket making success story.  Both the owner occupier versions and those crafted by professionals seem  infinitely more humane than the gloss varnished exotic hardwood, or worse still,mdf and brass handled caskets that are not only environmentally dubious but have a grim  formality about them that says nothing about the person inside.

The Somerset Willow Company  http://www.wickerwillowcoffins.co.uk/ has made a speciality of woven coffins and this one made for a child has a simplicity and beauty that seemed perfect to me when I saw it being made. Perhaps it is the similarity between the woven cradle and the woven coffin that suggests that a life has come full circle and the physical  body  is now returning from whence it came that makes it in some very small way, comforting.