The bones of my Basket bodies are armatures that reference human form, their skins constructed with materials that are embedded with human behavior.
Traditional basket making is a corporeal process and there are many parallels between basket-making and the expression and experience of a living body. Baskets, like bodies, are containers with multiple abilities: they both hold and take up space. The baskets I make are symbols of a practice that calls upon the maker to master pliability and tension through the movements of a physically engaging craft practice.
Onto my armatures of plastic tubing and wire, I apply my own worn clothing. I wrap small strips of my bodily coverings around the basket’s bones, covering the object’s skeleton with textiles that have literally held and therefore contain a record of my body’s action. To weave the sides of these vessels, I use elastic bra strapping, another material that holds and forms the human figure.
In “Phenomenology, Pomo Baskets, And the Work of Mabel McKay, Sheridan Housh writes “[Mabel’s] baskets make manifest some basic features of what it is like to live in the world”. My baskets are symbols and present-day artifacts. Basket-bodies are both sculpted figures that acknowledge my physical presence and earnest offerings to the viewer: to take them in is to take me in in my entirety: skin, blood, bones—all.
