iv: Our Assistant Editor in the Field
Ella Leith meets Jeanette Gray Ella Leith Jeanette Gray is, by her own admission, obsessed with basketry. Her business name, Weaving Wild, sums up her work: she weaves her baskets in the wild, from the wild, and is wild about her weaving. Since completing her two-year training in basketry at City Lit College, London, she has foraged materials from her home in Machynlleth, Wales, and used these to fashion her creations. Her specialism is wearable basketry: “Things that you can take out foraging or take on a walk with you,” she says. “Things that are useful— beautiful and useful. I’m not into sculptural baskets that just sit there to look nice. I want it to be used.” Little bags, backpacks and side-pouches are her stock in trade, as well as larger wearable baskets; a recent addition to her repertoire is tincture bottle holders worn as necklaces. Her work is sometimes dainty and astonishingly detailed; it is always robust and practical. As well as selling her wares, she teaches courses and workshops for individuals, private groups, and charities, taking her clients out into the landscape to forage and weave. Jeanette is all about the healing potential of being outside. I catch up with Jeanette on Zoom; inside for once, back in her childhood home in Scotland. To start the conversation, I quote a line from her website— ‘it was love at first basket’ —and her face lights up: It was! I was saying this to my dad last night— until I made a basket, I didn’t understand people who had hobbies. I wanted to understand; I tried different things and really wanted to be interested in them, but I just wasn’t. My experience was: “I guess I can do it, but I’m not excited by it.” And then I made a basket for the first time and suddenly I got it. It’s not a chore; it’s not something I feel that I should do because it’s going to make me a better person or more skilled or healthier. It’s just that I actively want to do this— I’m excited to do this. That first basket was made— and fallen in love with —while participating in a Week in the Woods, an outdoors education programme organised by the Bill Hogarth Memorial Association in Cumbria, back in 2012. Jeanette had just returned from a stint in New Zealand after finishing university; while away, she’d learnt that a friend— who was doing an apprenticeship in ancient coppice crafts and woodland management —had been diagnosed with a brain tumour, and she was eager to spend time with him: As part of his apprenticeship, they would run courses in the woods once a year for people to come and have a go at coppice crafts. My friend had become so ill that he’d lost movement and coordination on the left side of his body, so the only craft he could do at that stage was basketry. I remember being a bit disappointed, because I really wanted to make a chair or something else big and solid— “Oh, I have to make a basket...? Oh well.” But I wanted to spend time with him, so I went with it. And I loved it. Soon afterwards, I realised that I just wanted to make baskets. And it was a bit weird for me, because up until then I’d been trying to be a builder— I’d been working for a stonemasonry company, and I wanted to do big practical things. I didn’t think just making baskets was enough; I didn’t want to do the soft feminine thing. It was a battle against13 myself, to accept that it’s OK to like traditionally feminine things. You can do soft things and still be a good feminist!
