Markku Kosonen

Markku Kosonen died in September 2010, but I have only just found out.

This explains why I never got an answer to an email I sent to him at around the same time and why the Christmas greetings he used to send dried up. But, it never occurred to me that he might have died, just maybe, he had grown weary of communicating with someone whom he rarely shared the same physical space with. He was only 65.

Last night, idly wondering what he was doing now, I looked at his website and was shocked to see a date of death appended to his date of birth. Why had I not heard that he had died through the basket making world? He was, after all, a major pioneer in what is now commonly termed 'contemporary basket making'.

It is difficult to explain what his work meant to me when I first discovered it in the early 1980's. But I have always felt that it was very significant for my own development as a maker. In Britain, at that time, basket making could be summed up as buff willow dog baskets and cane edged melamine trays decorated with photos of the Queen, flowers, or winsome puppies. It was absolutely the nadir of basket making in Britain. Few farmers or fishermen were making baskets for their own use. The only people making baskets in any quantity were the last few commercial workshops struggling to compete with cheap foreign imports by making functional, but old fashioned and unexciting willow products. For me at that time it was very difficult to see how basket making could ever be as exciting as pottery or textiles. So, when I saw a very small picture of Markkus' white willow spiral basket in a Scandinavian design magazine it was a shocking experience. Here was the essence of a willow basket made form without reference to anything that had gone before. There was no weaving in this basket, no stakes, no strands, no bases or borders, yet it could still contain fruit. It was shocking, but so exciting and beautiful and it gave me the courage to try things differently with the basket making skills I had recently acquired. I loved him for having made this basket.

In 1998 Markku came to London because his work was on show in Valo- Reflecting Finnish Culture at the Barbican. Perhaps the most memorable piece in that exhibition, was one that has latterly been much imitated by other basket makers but which was radical then. It pursued a theme he had been working on since the 1980's using freshly cut willows with their catkins. Resembling a 'catherine wheel' functionality was now forgotten – this basket contained only air and occupied space - it was pure sculpture yet it still referenced willow baskets that had more earnest ambitions.

We met at the exhibition and the following day he came to my home and studio in Tower Hamlets. His spoken English was not good and my Finnish non-existent. The journey into east London had been a 'heart of darkness' experience for him, but we communicated through basket making and we continued to communicate sporadically through letters and emails over the ensuing years.

Markku wasn't only a basket maker, he was also a woodsman, philosopher, furniture maker, designer and artist, a man who loved trees and made some very beautiful objects. I am so sorry he has slipped away.

Boxes and Baskets



Fruit bowl, printed card

Corrugated cardboard has featured heavily in my work. I have always considered it to be a fairly natural material sitting somewhere between trees and paper. It is a wonderful material for basket making being flexible, relatively strong and kind to the things the baskets will contain. Initially I was attracted to it because I was looking for a way to use colour in my work without dying materials and cardboard lent itself to painting. Then I gave up using paint in my work (on environmental grounds) and so I stopped using card for a while because I couldn't get excited by brown. Then boxes started to change and became more colourful as a consequence of the way in which goods are displayed in supermarkets. Previously the boxes were emptied, the goods stacked on the shelves and the boxes taken away out of sight. Now many supermarkets use the boxes as part of the display and the suppliers and manufacturers now see colourful printed boxes as a means of attracting attention to their goods on the shelves. This is good news for me as now I can get hold of plenty of brightly coloured boxes!

So, this year I will be doing more cardboard workshops, somehow the moment seems right for it again as it costs nothing and is readily available, no matter where you live.

The first workshop will be in Shetland on the island of Yell on the 2nd and 3rd of March, it costs £60 for two days, no previous experience necessary and you can book a place by emailing me.

Numbers

This is the title of an exhibition of work by the members of Veer North, Britains most northerly group of visual artists based in the Shetland Islands. Our current exhibition on the theme of numbers opened last weekend at Bonhoga Gallery.

My contribution is a small clutch bag plaited out of the pages of a Shetland telephone directory. In order for it to perform as a bag in this damp climate, I wrapped the paper strips with polythene before plaiting, a labour of love but essential. Laminating the strips would have worked too, but I don't have a laminator and it would have meant buying materials, which is something I try to avoid doing. The strap is from an old camera and the button is a key from a defunct laptop.

The exhibition will be on until the 3rd of March.

Woven Tetra Stars

Not every tetra pak has a silver lining, but those for milk do and are useful for Christmas decorations.

These tetra stars cost nothing to make, require no toxic glitter sprays or glues and the only child labour involved will, hopefully, be that of your own children! Northern Europe, America, Scandinavia and Japan are the most commonly claimed locations for the origin of these decorations. It doesn’t really matter where they originated, but in the making of them there is weaving as you might find on baskets all over the world. There is also a whiff  of origami and surface decoration curls that often feature on south East Asian and Native American baskets.

You will need 4 strips of tetra pak 2cm wide and 55cm long. To get strips long enough from a one litre  carton you will have to cut off the top and bottom of the carton, open it out into a cylinder and cut spirally. Start with a taper and gradually widen it  until it measures 2cm. 

You can do this free hand but here are a couple of films that might help.  The first one shows you how to make a simple tool for cutting strips to an even width and the second how to use the tool to cut strips for weaving. 

Weave the four strips together, silver side up, making sure the weaving is in the centre of the strips so that all the free ends are the same length. 

Now do a “scooby doo” folding the four strips that are underneath forwards, in turn, over themselves and thread the last end under the first. The pictures show the 1st, 2nd and in the last one the 3rd and 4th moves together.

The printed side of the carton is now showing and all the strips are in pairs. 

 Turn the weaving over and repeat the action with the 4 strips that are on the top of each pair. 

 You now have all the strips spread out again.

With the silver side up, look at the edges of the woven square and you will see that half of the strips are behind just one layer of carton and half are behind a folded edge. Using the ones behind the single layer (they may be on the right or on the left of each pair depending on how you wove the initial square) fold the strip out to the side at an angle of 45degrees.

Then take the same strip around the back then forward to the front over the angled part and thread it down under the single layer of carton. 

Do the same with the other three ends that are underneath the single layer of card. You may need to cut points on the end of the strips to help with the threading. 

 Turn over and repeat the action on the other side, again using the strips that are under the single layer. 

 You will now have eight strips spread out.

On the silver side take one of the free ends that are on  top and lift it up into a loop. Now thread it from the centre of the weaving towards the outside and under the strip that it was previously lying on top of.  Pull the end gently down until it really doesn’t want to go any more and pinch the two edges together at the centre and coax the other part into a cone shape. 

Do the same with the other 3 strips that are on top of the weaving

Turn it over and do the same thing on the other side. Trim off the ends. If you want to hang the star, tie a loop of string with a single knot and push the loop up through the centre. You can gently pull the knot inside to hide it.

The variations are endless, not just with the size of strip but also the way in which it is started, the direction of the points and colour combinations.  For the raised parts it is possible to make cones that don’t touch each other, which makes it more spiky looking.  You can also make another set of points in between  these…. but I will let you play....

There is a whole milky way of possibilities for you to discover.

More Woven Home

Back in July I wrote about some of the things I had been making for my own home and mentioned I was working on a log basket - it is now finished.

The log basket that we were using  I made in traditional fashion, some years ago, with home grown willow. It didn’t however start life as a log basket, as it was made for taking washing out to the line. Since then a narrower door is used to take the washing outside. This basket was too wide to get through the door without tipping  it sideways and sometimes the clean washing fell out ... not a good way to start the day!

It was then  requisitioned  as a log basket but because it was originally meant for washing I hadn't rapped the weaving tightly and  little bits of wood and bark sifted themselves through the gaps and onto the floor. Consequently every time  the basket was moved it uncovered a pile of sawdust on the floor.  To deal with this I had made a highly engineered cardboard insert for the basket!

Perhaps you are getting the message from this, and from previous  posts, that, for me, good design is about making the daily tasks in life easier and more enjoyable and not about making  more housework.

So the new log basket had to deal with the sawdust problem, but I also wanted it to look more interesting and colourful than the brown willow one. I will have to look at it every day and brown makes me feel serious, it doesn’t really cheer me up.  If I am lighting the stove it is because I am cold and I need cheering up. The shape needed to be similar to the willow one, low and wide in order to relate to the shelves above it, but also to make it easy to see the choice of logs inside. It also needed to be fairly sturdy, though not too  hefty, as all it does is contain the logs.

In my stock of collected materials I found a pile of pressed card beer carriers. They came around bottles of German beer and are strong enough to hold and carry 3 litres of beer in glass bottles. I haven’t used them for anything before, which presented me with an interesting challenge, and the bright yellow design seemed ideal for the kitchen. But the carriers when opened up were not very big, so for plaiting they would have to be joined. I experimented with different ways of joining the strips and in the end decided that stapling would be efficient and quick. It seemed more honest to use staples than glue. The strips were cut quickly with a paper cutter,  stapled into long lengths and then plaited into a square based basket. Various decisions had to be made about how to staple the strips together, in terms of the design on the card, and then about what order to weave them in. I also considered which way to staple the strips so that the overlap could be pulled through the weaving. I only tell you this because you would not know about these things just by looking at the finished piece! A layer of black strapping tape was then woven in on top of the strips adding protection for the card and making the pattern more defined.

Some time ago I developed a way of using bunched willow for borders on plaited baskets. I decided to employ this technique again because it works really well and you don't have to soak the willow (always a bonus in my book). The woven card  basket, when it is only cut and stitched at the top edge, is still quite floppy but once the willow is attached it becomes tensioned and strong.  It seems as though you will never get the two ends to meet in anything other than a pointed leaf shape, but when they finally do, it forms  into a perfect ring and the basket becomes very solid. The process is a bit magical and I always enjoy doing it.

That left the handles and feet to resolve. The handles were made with  two pieces of electric cable with  the outer casing stripped off the ends of the wires.  These were then threaded  through the border to attach them. I decided that feet were necessary to protect the base of the basket from the tiled floor and  used black plastic lids from coffee jars that had been given to me. I riveted these on to the base, one in each corner and one in the middle. I could have stitched them on but that will be the back up if, for any reason, the rivets fail.

When I put the basket in place and took a photo I was quite shocked to realise that my choice of technique and colour scheme had not been my decision at all. It had, in fact, been decided for me by the Scottie dog and the Mexican tiger that have stood  on the shelves above the log basket for several years!

The Basketmakers' Association AGM 2012

The Basketmakers’ Association in the UK held its 38^th AGM at the  Art Workers Guild in London on the 20^th October. I haven’t been able to get to these meetings for a few years and so it was a pleasure for me to be able to go this year. I was  reminded of how atmospheric and appropriate  the Georgian room we hold the meeting in is, with its rush seated chairs and portrait covered walls which  include one of Thomas Okey the author of "The Art of  Basket-Making" (1900).

The AGM is a formal, commercial and social occasion rolled into one. The formal part requires the voting in of committee members and approving the accounts, the commercial is the sale of books and materials, and the social includes hearing a talk by someone interesting. This year we had the bonus of two speakers: Mary Butcher on her perception of the metamorphosis of the definition of “basket” over the last 30 years, and Tim Johnson talking about projects he has been involved in, at home and abroad. It is also possible at the AGM to enter a competition and perhaps most enjoyable of all catch up with people you may not have seen for a while.

This year we had to have a change of Chair and Secretary because Bunty Ball and Ruth Salter have uncomplainingly and very effectively done their time and I was delighted to see John Galloway press-ganged into service in the formidable role of Chair. John became a self employed basket maker at the same time that I did and lived not that far from me in London, but we have not crossed paths for many years.  John's speciality is robust, decorative indigo dyed willow baskets and his screens and “bottles” were highly sought after  in the 1980's. But he gave it all up to became a teacher of Design and Technology at secondary level and has only recently, after 17 years hard graft in the classroom,  returned to basket making.

It was a pleasure to see John elected, not only because he seemed genuinely pleased to be taking on this difficult and time consuming role, but also because he told the assembled audience that he aims to work towards a greater engagement by young people with basket making.  A glance around the room at the Art Workers Guild was sufficient evidence that this approach is desperately needed as there were few people present under the age of 50!

There are of course many reasons why the AGM is probably not the best way to judge the health of our organisation. A geographically spread membership, formal proceedings that can be off putting, no practical instruction on offer and a very large trade union march taking place in London on the same day could all have contributed to the small and not very youthful gathering on this particular day. But  I have spoken recently to members of both the Weavers Spinners and Dyers Guild and the Embroiderers Guild and the lack of younger members is apparently common to us all.

It seems important that we address this because what is the point of us working hard to conserve the knowledge of this amazing craft if we do not also try to interest  successive generations in it? They will, after all, be the guardians of this knowledge when we are gone and if they have no interest in it they are unlikely to be good guardians.

But how are we to do this? School seems the obvious place to start but there is little opportunity for anything practical to be learnt in schools in England now.  A recent political imperative in English education (the Scottish curriculum differs) to make the 3 R’s more important than any other type of education has, in conjunction with overreaching health and safety regulations, made it difficult to teach craft skills in schools.  I can only imagine that the school day must be very tedious for many children who have little opportunity to break up the relentless hours at their desks with fun things like woodwork, metalwork and cookery… well, I thought they were fun because they usually involved sharp tools and fire!

Luther Weston Turner, was in 1909 the Director of Manual Training in the Hill School Pottstown, Pennsylvania. and in his lovely little book, “The Basket Maker”, which I have mentioned  in a previous post, he explained why he thought  it was a good thing to teach basket making in school ….

“The fruition of thought is expression. Thought along the line of manual training is susceptible of expression in many ways and through many mediums. The expression of thought through wood and iron necessitates a more or less elaborate equipment of tools, and for this reason those mediums of expression are denied younger pupils. But the expression of thought through basketry, requires almost no tools, has variety as to form and color and almost unlimited possibilities in design.”

But with little real hope of basket making being considered an important addition to the curriculum in England we will probably have to think of other means.

As followers of this blog will be aware the exhibition of my work Urban Baskets toured for two years and having been seen by 57,000 people, including lots of children, in UK and the Netherlands it has now been returned to me. Initially I was tempted to burn the whole lot, it was such hard work finding venues and I am not ready to go through that struggle again just yet.  Disposing of it all, therefore, seemed a simple, if polluting (given the amount of waste plastic I use in my work) solution to a storage problem! For a few weeks the 10 very large boxes glowered at me every time I squeezed past them, but eventually I plucked up the courage to open one and by chance it was  the one with the copy of the visitors book in it. I had not seen the comments from the Harley Gallery, (the last venue) and there were pages and pages of comments almost exclusively enthusiastic and many of them written by school children. Their excitement at seeing the work is evident as this example shows.

Many of their comments made me laugh but also made me realise that children can be excited and interested by baskets. You could tell that many of these children were just itching to make one. Some children did get a chance to do a weaving workshop during the time Urban Baskets was at the Harley but it was led by a permanent member of staff, not a basket maker, and they didn’t make a basket!  These workshops have their own 'health and safety' problems as I described in this post.

In all the time that I have been a member of the Basketmakers' Association, both on and off the committee, there has never been any determined effort, that I have been aware of, to engage children or young people with the craft, or our activities. This is probably because there have been too many other imperatives and too few members willing to take on the work. John's willingness to take on the job of Chair therefore seems opportune and hopefully his knowledge, experience and passion for the subject can, with our assistance, be the catalyst for us to develop a new way to engage young people with this fantastic, versatile, easy and inexpensive craft.

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.