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.

Effort - Less is More

2007 willow and plastic lids

Sometimes, I just have to accept that it isn't going to work  in the way that I hope it will  and a whole weeks work has to be abandoned. That happened last Friday and the minute I made that decision and started something else it all flowed smoothly again.

Next year there will be some exhibitions of my work in Australia and in order to keep the shipping charges as low as possible we are not sending pieces with willow bark.  They necessitate fumigation and all sorts of other noxious processes to avoid the immigration into Australia of  rogue insects or diseases. But, the organisers of the exhibitions particularly liked  a couple of the pieces in brown willow with plastic lids (see picture above)  so I offered to try doing something similar but using white willow. I wasn't intending to reproduce the pieces, just to do something in the same vein. But, what I discovered  was that my original choice of brown willow  had been the best choice and that white willow didn't perform in the same way. It was much harder to prevent it kinking and the dark lines of the original brown willow looked better than the white. White might have worked on a dark surface but then there wouldn't be any of the graphic shadows and few galleries have dark walls and plinths. These problems were compounded by not having the right sort of wire, it was a bit too stiff and difficult to control and as I don't buy materials  that was that. I remade the same things four times in different ways but it just didn't work. The lids,  however, are still lovely and will be used for something else.

Fighting with my materials has never been my modus operandi, it always seems to show and  the work looks as tense as I feel doing it. I want my work to look as though it has been effortless to make  even though I might have spent many hours on it. It's  an economically  counterproductive way of working because if  it looks effortless potential customers can't appreciate the work that has gone into it and therefore think the price I am asking is unjustified. 

The balance between perceived and actual invested value, i.e time,  is an interesting one. I was once approached by an American gallery who wanted me to make a 'basketry teapot' for a show they were putting on. It had to be teapot sized (cheap to ship) though it didn't need to function as one and with as much labour in it as possible to justify an expensive price tag. I didn't take up the invitation because not only did I find the idea of a basket teapot horrible,  but, also because  it seemed such a stupid  idea to deliberately put as much labour as possible into a piece, when you could do something good much more simply.

Now I understand  that there is a whole commercial craft market that operates out of galleries in high overhead locations that work on this principle. Because these galleries are often quite small they can't show big works but they can get a lot of financial value on plinths by showing small one-off works with phenomenal amounts of labour built into them. It's not the amount of labour I find difficult to deal with, but the fact that it exists for one purpose only, and that is to make the item more expensive. It's almost as if it doesn't seem to  matter if the basketry teapot is a gross and pointless object as long as a customer can be convinced that they are buying a lot of someone elses skill, time and effort at a good price.

Ironically the production market works the other way. When we ran our own basket production company the buyers from stores constantly pushed us to lower our prices, but the only way we could do that was to take the labour out of the product. So for ten years  I designed the labour out of our baskets and in the end our baskets had very little weaving left in them.

These experiences have brought me to a place where, although  I believe Mies van der Rohes precept for minimalist design that "less is more", I  find I still have to show some  evidence of my labour in my work for people to like it enough to want to buy it. Its' a weird  place to be in and quite challenging.

This week I am having fun with  a sack full of corks, it may work, it may not, but at the moment I am optimistic that I will be able to strike the balance between evident effort and effortlessness!

Ateliers d'Art

Cover of September /October issue of Ateliers d'Art showing 'Start Point Tree' 2013 by Corentin Laval.
Photo by Bernard Dupuy

A couple of weeks ago and quite unannounced I received, in the post, a  glossy French craft magazine 'Ateliers d'Art' which, to my  surprise, had a really good picture of 'Satellites' in it taken during the exhibition at Nontron. The picture  featured as part of an article about the shift  towards artistic practice by some willow basket makers in France.

'Satellites' 2013
Photo by Bernard Dupuy

Articles about willow and basket making generally  make me nervous because they are often poorly researched, especially the ones for newspapers and  glossy 'housey' type magazines.  Usually these articles cast a romantic eco-glow over the whole subject with lots of seductive pictures of willows and weaving and seldom a glance at the bigger picture of unsustainable practice amongst commercial willow growers  and the massive international (and equally unsustainable) trade in willow products from China and elsewhere.

But, this article  is different, possibly  because it isn't trying to sell  anything. Well researched by its author, Dominique Brisson  it examines some of the key historical and socio-economic factors that have reduced the number of people engaged in willow basket making in France over the last century. It  goes on to suggest that France now has  a handful of mostly young makers who are starting to use willow and willow skills as a means of artistic expression, rather than for purely functional baskets, including  Erik Barray, Myriam Roux,  Corentin Laval and Karen Gossart. Interestingly Erik Barray  acknowledges that France is lagging behind in this respect and is quoted as saying "que depuis longtemps, les choses bougent beaucoup plus en Angleterre qu'en France" ( for a long time things have moved more in England than in France)  and the author continues "Les Anglo Saxons semblent en effet avoir une plus grande liberte avec la matiere" ( the Anglo Saxons seem, in effect, to have a greater liberty with the material).  Alastair Heseletine, Trevor Leat,  Tom Hare and Tim Johnson are all mentioned in the context of artistic work with willow but curiously not Laura Ellen Bacon or Lizzie Farey who are possibly the most groundbreaking of the British females who work almost exclusively with willow. My work gets a mention in the context of re-cycling, even though that is still an alien concept in the world of French basket making which is still dominated by willow.

Sweeney on his Throne by Trevor Leat 2013

It is an interesting article which  drew my attention to Trevor Leats work again. Generally I am not too keen on figurative willow work because it often seems to me to be ugly or lacking in real sculptural qualities, but Trevor does some amazing stuff. I particularly like this piece that  he did on Eigg recently and enjoyed his blog about his residency there. Michelle Cain works in a similar vein making giant figurative works for festivals and events and her willow badger  for Pembrokeshire (which you can see on the link) is very impressive!

If you want to read the article in Ateliers d'Art you can do so via the link by paying 3.50€ to the publishers of the magazine. (If they weren't a charitable association I would offer to copy it for you!)

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.

Traditions Futuristes, A New View

Yesterday we received the catalogue for Traditions Futuristes the exhibition running until December in Tusson, France. It was a lovely surprise to find this image of the Retroscope taken by Raphael Mouly. It gave us another way of seeing our work that we had not envisaged but which gives food for thought for future projects. Thanks to Raphael and to Natacha Billot for her work on the catalogue.

Viva Basket!

Is the name of an event that took place last week in the border town of Cieszyn, in Poland.

Organised by Serfenta in collaboration with Norwegian partners, it is part of a wider project to research baskets and makers in both countries and it brought together outdoor installations, exhibitions and an international conference. I was invited along with Jette Mellgren, JanJohansen and Carlos Fontales to create outdoor pieces.  Jette and Jan worked on the (northern) Polish side of the border and Carlos and I worked in a small public park with a pond full of water lilies in the Czech Republic! In reality it was only a footbridge without  formalities that separated the two teams.

Strapping tape was sourced for us from Castorama, by the car load.......

Photo courtesy of Serfenta.

and we combined it with willows to create a ‘fountain’ of plaited hearts (me) and clusters of random woven ‘parasols’ (Carlos).

The installation of the ‘fountain’ could not have been achieved without the help of the brave Marek Malesza – the pond had some big fish in it! My thanks go to him, also to Paulina Adamska Malesza, Ania Krezelok and everyone else at Serfenta for all their hard work on this event and for inviting me to be a part of it.

Retroscope

The Retroscope, constructed using medieval technology, enables us to look back into the past. When Marguerite d’Angouleme stayed in the Maison du Patrimoine in 1547 she did what a lot of us do when travelling and left behind some of her personal possessions. With the help of the Retroscope it is possible to see  two of them.... a pair of sunglasses and her mobile phone!

 

The exhibition is on  until the 15th December.