Basketry: Making Human Nature

Review of the exhibition 'Basketry: Making Human Nature' held at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (8 Feb.-22 May 2011). Exhibition examining basket-making across various historical, geographical and cultural contexts, and presenting a range of basketry artefacts from craft to avant-garde design, curated by Sandy Heslop. Opens with a section entitled 'Number Pattern Form' demonstrating that basketry objects reveal a human need through regular and repetitive, yet creative, activity to assert control over the natural world. Section two, 'Transformations', highlighted the ways in which basketry techniques and patterns have crossed media and materials. Section three, 'Harvest', focused on basketry's uses within everyday life, especially catching and storing food. Further sections included 'Protecting the Body', presenting worn artefacts used for reasons from safety to comfort, 'Ritual and Belief', displaying masks, and a case study on basketry from the Purari Delta in Papua New Guinea. Also featured a film on East Anglian basket-making. The review notes that this is not a craft exhibition, and is more focused on anthropology and archaeology, with most objects the result of the application of a set of widely-shared skills directed at the creation of utilitarian tools. (Quotes from original text)