Once upon a time I took a class in Alaska with a master basket weaver. As we worked she told us stories, often about her tribe’s customs. When she was very young, she told us, her grandmother began teaching her to make twined cedar baskets. They kept all of her work on a shelf to show the improvement over time. When she had mastered the craft, her grandmother took all of the baskets on the shelf and burned them. “You don’t want anyone to see these,” her grandmother told her. “You only want to be known for excellence.”

As I remember it, we all gasped, mumbled something about cultural differences and went on with our own work, knowing full well our work would certainly be worthy of the flames by her grandmother’s standards…and perhaps by hers as well.

I still have my first basket. I made it in a class with Judy Olney at DeCordova Museum in the 1980s and I cringe at the mistakes. I had a lot to learn about shaping. And arrows. It is, however, an important reminder of when I got hooked on basketry which , of course, changed the course of my life.

And I still have my worst basket. I made it in Taos working with an Apache teacher who took us out to the willow patch, sliced a piece of willow, made three notches in on end, held one third in her teeth and elegantly separated three even wands in one smooth movement. We all eagerly cut our lengths, made our notches, bit down and started peeling. Off popped uneven, short slivers of willow. There was not a hint of elegance. Things did not improve as the week progressed and I came home with sore and bleeding hands and one of the ugliest, most pitiful baskets ever made.

Obviously, I did not learn to make Apache willow baskets, but I did learn a lesson I don’t want to forget: no matter how accomplished you think you are, nothing comes “naturally.”

In addition to keeping me in my place, that humiliating week has made me a better teacher. Learning is hard and frustrating, especially for adults. We get comfortable with our competence. As toddlers, we persist until we are upright and walking. As youngsters we don’t question spending hours and scrapped knees learning to ride a bike. Our patience with learning, however, seems to wane when we “grow up.” I know this is true for me and it’s one reason I return time and again to North Country Studio Workshops… and I don’t take the basketry class.

I go to North Country Studio workshops to experience some failure. That is an exaggeration, but not much. I want to do something that does not come easy, to make something that does not come out quite right. NCSW is the perfect place for this kind of discomfort because people at NCSW respect slow growth. The experienced artists there know that hands and eyes need time to acquire new skills. It is not about making something perfect in five days. My hands were very, very unhappy when I took a NCSW workshop on making wire machines. They simply did not want to use tools…they kept going straight for the material as they are used to in basketry. They did not want help.

I begin my standard instructor slide shows with an image of that first basket and then one of my recent pieces.

This lets me talk about what happened in between. I like to walk people along my path as a maker. How did I get from that misshapen bread basket to something like this which I just finished.

When I was first learning to be a basketmaker I binged on workshops that put me in a room with people who really knew what they were doing. I learned by copying them. I have my Lissa Hunter basket, my Kari Lonning basket, my Jackie Abrams basket. You get the picture. And I stuck with Judy Olney’s classes because she always came up with something else I needed to learn. This is one of the baskets she helped our class make. I liked it just fine and stuck it on a shelf because I just want to coil.

Years later, after 9/11, I took to making small twined baskets on airplanes because I was not allowed even a blunt plastic needle for coiling which was my favorite thing to do at the time. One day I looked at this basket and said, hmmm, I wonder if I could do that blocky-thing and some weird shaping with waxed linen? First there was this… definite candidate for the flames.

and then I made my first “landscape” basket.”

And that turned into this…but only after years of experimenting with patterning and with ways to exaggerate and control shaping. And there were lots of failures in there.

If my students only see my good stuff, I will not have done my job as a teacher. I constantly remind my adult students that learning is hard. It takes time and it takes determination and you won’t like everything you make. At least one student in every class says, “Why doesn’t mine look like yours?” My wiseacre response is, “Give it another couple hundred hours.” I go to North Country so I can be that student struggling with a new material or a new technique.

I can’t say I love my bad work, or even treasure it. But I am not going to burn it. I just keep it close and remember that our first and our worst are, in the end, part of our newest and our best.

By Lois Russell, NCSW Planning Committee Member

www.loisrussell.com

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