February 2021 roundup

I’ve spent most of February working on a commission for a tortoise vessel. Someone saw my black and yellow one on Instagram and asked if I could make one in a different colourway.

As before, I started by making the individual scutes.

Then I joined them together and added the border.

Then I made the base with the hidden tortoise design.

The client was very pleased, and so am I.

Dorset buttons and looping

Although our basketry group has still heard nothing about when our course will resume, we are still meeting every fortnight on Zoom, and choosing a theme to work on for each session.

The first one was Dorset buttons. To be honest, I found this a bit fiddly. I normally like fiddly, but maybe I needed a break after the fiddly work on the tortoise. But I did manage to produce a button!

Then we had a go at looping. I found this more relaxing and tried two methods. The first one was looping around a stone, starting at the opening on top and closing it together on the bottom.

As you can see, the looping pattern looks quite regular on the top and sides, but becomes more irregular and organic on the bottom where I pulled the loops together to close up.

I also made a looped basket with homemade cordage, this time starting at the bottom and working up to finish at the opening. The advantage of this is that I made the cordage as I went along, so didn’t have to worry about how to hide the joins.

Tetrapak dog update

I’ve made a bit of progress on the dog. The back half is complete, along with the head and the front legs.

Back legs and tail

Head

I only need to drink another five cartons of orange juice to get enough material to finish it!

Packaging material and ice

One of the highlights of my month was receiving a delivery (replacement butter dish, not very interesting) wrapped in some fantastic packaging material – some kind of pierced brown paper.

What was interesting is the way the paper had opened up and retained the form of what it was wrapped around, a bit like memory foam.

Apparently, according to comments on my Instagram post, it’s called Geami WrapPak. I’ve saved it until I can work out what to do with it!

We also had a very cold spell, where temperatures didn’t rise above 0ºC for several days. A basin of water I’d left in the garden froze solid – a chance to try making an ice sculpture by moving the frozen block into a different position every day.

However, the temperature rose again before I could get the full propeller effect!

As I write this, it’s warmed up enough for the first frogspawn to appear in the pond.

The other news is that I am to be the new editor of the Basketmakers’ Association newsletter. Although it’s called a newsletter, it’s a 68-page journal that is published four times a year, so it will be quite a lot of work! But there is a very supportive team (we are all volunteers), and I’m looking forward to making lots of interesting contacts with some fantastic basketmakers. So wish me luck!

Ruth Asawa at David Zwirner

“An artist is not special. An artist is an ordinary person who can take ordinary things and make them special.”

Ruth Asawa is best known for her hanging wire sculptures, a technique she learnt on a trip to Mexico in 1947. Her elevation of this method of making functional baskets into creating elemental transparent forms enclosing other forms makes me think of Haeckel drawings brought to life.

She did not have an easy beginning. As a Japanese American, at the age of 16 she was interned by the US government along with the rest of her family after the outbreak of the Second World War. Luckily, after 18 months, a Quaker scholarship allowed her to study to be an art teacher in Milaukee.

However, unable to teach due to continued hostility to the Japanese, Asawa travelled to Black Mountain College in North Carolina to study art. Here, among luminaries including Josef and Anni Albers and Buckminster Fuller, she gained the courage to become an artist and to do what she wanted to do. She also met her future husband, architectural student Albert Lanier, with whom she had six children.

Living with Lanier in San Francisco, Asawa managed to carry on working around family life, often at night or in the early morning. It paid off, as she began to get recognition for her sculptures, and was asked to explain them.

“My curiosity was aroused by the idea of giving structural form to the images in my drawings. These forms come from observing plants, the spiral shell of a snail, seeing light through insect wings, watching spiders repair their webs in the early morning, and seeing the sun through the droplets of water suspended from the tips of pine needles while watering my garden.”

As well as looping, she also experimented with tied wire to create branching forms.

In the late 1960s, Asawa moved into arts activism, cofounding the Alvarado School Arts Workshop to give schoolchildren the chance to work directly with professional artists. She was later instrumental in building a public high school for the arts in San Francisco in 1982.

“A child can learn something about colour, about design, and about observing objects in nature. If you do that, you grow into a greater awareness of things around you. Art will make people better, more highly skilled in thinking and improving whatever business one goes into, or whatever occupation. It makes a person broader.”

Ruth Asawa died in 2013, five years after her husband.

The exhibition at David Zwirner in London, A Line Can Go Anywhere, includes work spanning more than five decades of Asawa’s career, including drawings as well as sculpture. The exhibition runs until 22 February 2020.

If you miss it, there is another Ruth Asawa exhibition coming up at Modern Art Oxford, from 30 May to 6 September 2020.