A Family of Baskets

Knowing I am interested in old baskets, Neil, a  friend and professional electrician, brought these baskets for me to look at. He spotted them in the loft of an old farm in Charente, Limousin that had just changed hands and where he was working on the renovation.  The previous owners were 'paysans' and these baskets were  obviously made to be used on the smallholding.

It is unusual to come across a collection like this. Baskets that are thrown into lofts and forgotten are usually destroyed by woodworm.  Coiled straw baskets tend to survive in  the Charente because woodworm are not very interested in straw, though they will have a go at the bramble stitching. Sadly the two large frame baskets had either had something damp left in them or been sitting under a leak. As a result the chestnut frame work has become a filigree of worm tunnels in just a couple of places on the bases and are now ready to crumble away. The worms like their wood damp, I guess its easier on their teeth!

Eel traps

Not only is it unusual to find a group like this in relatively good condition but the variety is intriguing. Among them are chestnut eel traps and baskets, one for harvesting root crops which acts as a sieve and a little rectangular one with a pegged base and rim, possibly for egg gathering. Then there are several chestnut and split willow frame baskets, three of which have been made by someone who has done many of these and knows exactly how to do it. The very small one without a handle is beautifully made.

 At first I thought it had lost its handle but in fact the ribs have been carefully cut to a point where they meet on each side so perhaps it was never intended to have a handle. But  I cannot  be certain, as someone may have shaped the rib ends after the handle had broken. There is also a tiny frame basket, again chestnut ribs and split willow like  the bigger ones, but it was never finished. I almost burst into tears looking at it as my first and slightly bizarre thought was that the maker had died before finishing it. Since then I have rationalised it as a "teaching aid" for the grandchildren which makes me much happier!

It seems highly unlikely that these baskets were all made by the same person, though possibly by two generations of the same family, and the person who made  the three brown willow baskets obviously never had access to the 'teaching aid'! These three  look much more recent and are great examples of someone just having a go,  without much prior knowledge, and arriving at something that functions.  It wasn't without a mega struggle though, and if the maker won in the end, the willow certainly  put up a good fight.

In a way I love these baskets as much as the perfectly crafted ones. They seem to prove the theory that  basket making is innate in all of us, not the arty farty, tidy,  tightly controlled kind of basket making that I and many others engage in, but a raw, energetic, wrestling with twigs to make a basket to gather the crop in before  it rains or the winter sets in.  How the basket looks being of zero importance in this context.

There is a similarity with music making which also appears to be innate in all of us. Thomas Brennan, my Irish father in law had only one question for people who said they could play a musical  instrument... "can you get a tune out of it?" He wasn't interested in whether they knew their scales or could read sheet music, all that mattered to him was whether or not they could play a tune he could dance to. As far as Thomas was concerned, music was for dancing to, just as these baskets were made for carrying crops and nothing else is therefore relevant.

Sometimes it seems as though too much knowledge suffocates the life out of things.

Ding Dong Decorations

These straw decorations were on sale in Lidl recently for 2.99€ the box, but it didn't say where they came from, just that there were 56 pieces  made of natural straw in the box and that 'these are not toys!' So it gave me an excuse to do a bit of online research.

Trying to fish out some truths from an ocean of disinformation is usually the big challenge with online research. However  anything to do with basketry manufacture is  generally quite  straight forward because the answer, 90% of the time, is China. But, I was taught, when doing research for my doctorate, that you must assume nothing and never state as fact anything you cannot back up with evidence, which in academic research terms,  usually takes the form of a published statement of the fact.

So, my  first task, using the information provided on the box, was to check out the name of the brand  'Melinera' and as with most of the 'brand' names in Lidl stores, it turns out that Melinera is just a trademark created by Lidl in 2012 to market a particular type of product. In this case mainly lighting and decorative items including Christmas lights and decorations.

So, the next  search was for images of  'straw christmas decorations'  and this turned up loads of photos of almost identical boxes,  but being sold under lots of different brand names and by lots of companies, at widely varying prices. Some are being marketed as 'Scandinavian Straw Decorations' but everybody knows that 56 straw stars made by anyone in Scandinavia is going to cost way more than 2.99€, so it refers only to the Scandinavian  tradition of straw Christmas decorations, rather than the place of manufacture. But, could they be trying to persuade some unsuspecting buyer that it means the latter ? Wouldn't it be more honest to say Scandinavian Style Straw Decorations?

Having seen that the same boxes were  being retailed  by lots of different companies  I now knew that the manufacturer  sells the product wholesale, probably at trade fairs. Next search was for  'manufacturers of straw decorations' (which in retrospect I could have started my search with, but it only took  me a couple of minutes to get this far!).  Very quickly you find yourself at the inscrutable face of Chinese manufacturing where few companies have web sites but are listed on a thousand trade directories that appear to be run by the various regional governments or councils.
It doesn't take more than five minutes however to establish that the biggest and most active company (in terms of international trade fairs)  in this field is Dong Guang County LIZE Handicraft CO.,LTD.and the fact they show at the Frankfurt gift fair makes me almost certain  they are the ones selling  these decorations to Lidl which is, of course, a German company.

Here, in what reads  like a Google translation, is Dong Guang County LIZE Handicraft CO.,LTDs  own description of what they do.....!

"The main production straw ornaments, the willow product, the product has more than 10000 series several thousand varieties, the modelling is novel, the weaving is fine, the dependable quality, actually the interior decoration, the holiday thing, above the etiquette contact rides the high quality goods. The company is equipped with the artistic exhibit room and has the specialty foreign trade personnel to attend the Guangzhou Export and Import Fair and the Frankfurt fair. The company has the consummation management system, and may act according to different national the standard production to suit the different market the product. "

I love this bit...  'actually the interior decoration, the holiday thing, above the etiquette contact ' ....quoi????  and this isn't bad either...  'the consummation management system' ... the mind boggles!!

Many of the Chinese trade directory listings don't have photos but alibaba.com does, so a quick scroll through the pages and there we find what looks a lot like the Lidl box. Lidl are selling the box of decorations for 2.99€ so it is highly unlikely that they have paid more than 1€ for the box. It will take a highly skilled straw craftsman/woman at least 5 minutes to make one of the 5 plait rings or bells in the Lidl box. I don't know what the people who make these things get paid but I don't imagine it is anything like as much, percentage wise, as the middle men and women who are marketing them......so what's new?

 My search started because it did not say on the box where the decorations were made and this is the case with most of the basketry that is imported into Europe. How can we make an informed choice about whether we want to buy something that has been shipped half way around the world if we don't have that information? Until we demand that legislation  the most obvious option left to us is not to buy any basketry that does not state clearly where it has been made.

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.