Moving Outside the Lines
- A detailed look at “Twilight Cicada” by Boulder, Colo., basket maker Jill Powers.
Credit: Russell McDougal
From the sweetgrass Carolina low country to the pine forests of the Pacific Northwest, generations of American basket makers have created objects that are not only functional but also beautiful. In recent decades, more adventurous artists have blurred the boundaries of basketry, using nontraditional materials and innovative techniques to fashion pieces of all shapes, sizes and colors. Functionality, in many cases, has vanished; contemporary baskets are often works designed solely to engage the senses.
So just how are baskets defined nowadays? There are as many answers as there are artists. “It’s a vessel that can breathe, that’s filled with space,” says Michael Davis, a North Carolina artist whose basketry is collected by national institutions including the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery. Santa Fe, N.M., gallery owner Jane Sauer, herself a widely collected fiber artist, considers it “a form that’s moving toward the sculptural.” Sara Lieberman, a collector in Scottsdale, Ariz., quotes New York artist John McQueen, who called one of his baskets “a container not for things, but for ideas.”
It’s a vessel that can breathe, that’s filled with space
What unifies the field, perhaps, is the passion artists bring to the time-consuming process of gathering and preparing materials, then shaping them into objects of personal expression, using techniques ranging from traditional weaving and coiling to knotting, knitting, embroidering and stitching.
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