ARTISAN
MAGIC TOUCH Nadine and Maisie pose for a picture in her home studio (left) where she makes beautiful and intricate pieces, such as the docky bag (right), inspired by woven baskets used by farmworkers
“As an apprentice, all you would be making for a year would be the basket bases, then the following year you’d be allowed to make the basket that the base was made for, and so on. It literally is repetition. If you were going to make a living as a basketmaker, you would need to be producing a lot.” Learning from the past Long before the advent of plastics, Cambridgeshire’s agricultural industry relied on light, flexible but strong willow baskets to transport produce from the fields to markets. One of Nadine’s signature pieces is the Fenland ‘docky bag’, inspired by soft woven baskets used by farmworkers to carry their lunch, and named because the workers didn’t get paid for the time they took to eat: their wages got docked, and lunch became ‘docky’. “If you’re a basketmaker, you’re also a bit of an anthropologist – you’re always thinking about humans and existence. The docky bag is a vernacular basket. It needs a lid because you would have wanted to keep your lunch safe from pests and cool while you’re working in the fields, and it would have probably been made using rushes, maybe flag iris leaves and greater reedmace leaves. There are some old docky bags in the stores in the Museum of Cambridge.” This brushes against a built-in challenge for basketmakers. Because baskets are woven from natural materials – in Nadine’s case, materials she’s either grown herself or harvested by hand from riverbanks near her home – with time, they’ll degrade away to nothing. Fantastic for the environment, but if the skills aren’t passed on to another maker, the techniques quite literally disappear. Basketmaking is a piece of ‘intangible cultural heritage’: each creation carries an invisible link between the user of the
basket and the person who made it, as well as the expert who taught the maker in the first place. Over the years, Nadine has collected many different skills, attended numerous workshops and read an awful lot of books, and she is now regularly running her own classes around Cambridgeshire, as well as from her home studio. She’s also a yeoman basketmaker to The Worshipful Company of Basketmakers, doing her bit to keep her craft alive. “The community in general are really generous at passing on skills because we’re all just here for a tiny little snip of time, aren’t we? So, I suppose that’s my job over the next decade: to pass this on.” Although we’re (sadly) beyond needing baskets for industry, there are many other reasons to try your hand at this ancient craft. “It’s really fantastic for your fine motor skills and it’s a very good physical workout, especially if you’re making big pieces. There’s also lots of numeracy, physics and engineering in there – as well as that mindful aspect. Sometimes it’s not mindful, especially when it’s not going quite as you want it to and you just have to think, ‘okay, today’s a bad day’. People say, ‘oh, it must be so therapeutic’ and I think well, yes, if it’s going right it is! It’s more about having a day where you’re really, really present. “I usually say at the start of a workshop that your basket won’t look like mine, and it’s not meant to because it’s your brain and your hands, and this has been made by my brain and my hands. People put a lot of pressure on themselves to perform, to get everything perfect. When I teach, I don’t use the word perfect because there isn’t any such thing.” Apart from Maisie the dachshund, of course…
@elybasketmaker | elybasketmaker.com
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