Barbara Heins on Basketry

Barbara Heins on Basketry

Shaelagh Cull

Barbara Heins

Malting Tower at the Tett Centre

There are not many people in probably the world, except in some countries who know how to make baskets anymore. It's kind of a lost art. It was traditionally one of the first things everybody learned because you had to make your own containers, right. And so I'm not sure why it's fallen by the wayside. Part of the reason may just be it's hard to find the right materials. You know, historically, indigenous people use whatever fibres were available in their country. Well, not just their country, but their region. So the West Coast, people use the cedar bark, whereas birch bark was used here, East Coast, people used ash, you know, they made splint out of it. So it's labor intensive, even just to get the materials now. So for many years, I would say sort of when I started making baskets, until fairly recently, people mainly use commercial reed. And so that's rattan which is brought in from Indonesia, and treated. It was easy to get and it's easy to work with. And when I teach a workshop, I often still use it because it is easy to manipulate. But I found recently that just like me, most people would like to use local materials. And so I've made these baskets called on the spot baskets, where you just go somewhere where you can pick harvest material and make a basket from whatever's there. So you can pick grass and braid the grass and then sew the grass together, right. So there's lots of materials that can be used. But I think a lot of people just don't know how to use those materials. If you look on the internet and kind of see the basketry that's trending on the West Coast, it's all about different roots. So they're harvesting the cedar roots as well as the bark. I have a sister who lives on Vancouver Island, and she belongs to basketry guild there. And it's incredible what they're doing with these local materials and making really artistic things. And then some of them are being nature dyed on top of it. So they get different colors. And people are realizing it's not sustainable to be using the cane that we get from Indonesia. And it's much better like a lot of the materials we use here, we often harvest them in the fall when they're dying off anyway, like reeds and rushes things like that. So it's not really having much of an impact on the environment, minimal anyway. I think the biggest drawback though, is that, you can go to the store and buy a basket for not very much money, and then when people see how many hours it takes to actually make one, it's hard to buy a handmade basket because of the cost. But most people who take the workshops or want to learn do it for themselves and it's a self satisfaction of making a basket of materials you've collected and doing it from start to finish.