Our Assistant Editor in the Field

Ella Leith meets Jeanette Gray

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 forme, because up until then I’d been trying to be a builder— I’d been working for astonemasonry 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 against myself, to accept that it’s OK to like traditionally feminine things. You can do soft things and still be a good feminist!

Speaking of soft things, I noticed on her website that she lists Moss as one of the materials she uses. What does she use that for? I ask. Because obviously you can’t make a basket out of Moss— “Aha, can you not?” Jeanette interrupts me, grinning, and I realise I’m being naive. Go on then, how do you make a basket out of Moss?

Well, I don’t use so much of it anymore. A lot of the learning is about how to sensitively forage and not take too much of the plant. We’ve had a lot of very hot summers where I am so I’m sensitive about taking a lot of it— it’s Polytrichum commune that I use, one of its common names is Hair-moss. You need quite a lot to make a basket, so I try to take a little bit from each patch. I didn’t take any last year, to let it all have a rest year after the drought. But it’s amazing stuff, Hair-moss. It can grow to maybe two-foot-long strands— long filaments that are bright red and beautiful. And what I do is plait it and then I sew it.

When I was at college I made a babycarrier out of Hair-moss. It took memonths: it was one continuous plait ofMoss that would probably have beenlong enough to wrap around my housetwice. The plait was sewn to itself, andthen I taught myself to make felt andlined the inside. It looked like a giantslipper.

As with most of her creations, the design was her own— “I kind of make it up as I go along,” she says. The designs are responsive to the materials she uses, which she often mixes within one piece: Partly that’s just for the visual— different colours, different textures — but also, different materials do different things. I use a lot of Spruce roots (Picea sitchensis), which are good for sewing because they’re strong and they’re tight. So, I’d sew on the rim of a bark basket with Spruce roots. And handles— if I need a handle, I’ll use Nettle string (Urtica dioica). Most basket making is in grown cultivars of Willow (Salix spp.) and I started off using that, but it wasn’t a material that came naturally to me. I had a lot of struggle with it when I was at college. Most of the other students were living in Central London; I was travelling in from rural Wales, and I realised that I could do something different— I could actually make use of what I have around me. So, I branched away from Willow. What excites me is using materials from the landscape.

Foraging works around the seasons. In winter, there are the materials that you need to gather when the sap is low. That’s woody things and vines: Brambles (Rubus spp.) and Ivy (Hedera helix). In spring, it’s the materials you collect when the sap is rising, so Willow bark— I peel a lot of wild Goat Willow (Salix caprea). Then in the summer, it’s all the leafy things that you want to cut at peak growth, so a lot of Grasses (Poaceae spp.) and stuff from the garden like Crocosmia (C. spp.), Iris leaves (I. spp.), and Cat-tails (Thyphus latifolia). Cat-tails are what we call Bullrush in this country; I use the American name, because people get it confused with the basketry Rush (Scirpis lacustris). Early summer is also when you extract fibres— Bramble fibre and Nettle fibre for making string. Then it’s autumn. In food foraging, there’s the ‘hungry gap’ in early spring when there isn’t really anything to forage; autumn is the hungry gap of basketry. There’s not really a lot to harvest and you’re waiting until you can get the vines again. I am lucky that there’s a real abundance of materials where I live. I am quite into focussing on what is available where you are: I don’t travel a lot, I don’t fly, and I like the idea of really getting into where you live. But I do travel to the coast to get various Grasses, and I buy in a little bit of Willow. I also buy Rush from my friend Linda Lemieux of Wood and Rush— she’s an amazing basket maker. She has a little field in Somerset that no one else wanted because it was boggy and full of Rush; she leapt at the chance. Rush doesn’t grow where I live, but it’s such a versatile, beautiful material. When I can, I go on her annual Rush cut, going out in a coracle to cut it. It’s a really lovely thing to do.

Jeanette speaks of each material with reverence. Which, I ask, is her favourite?

I really love Brambles. There are loads of different species of Brambles and they have such different qualities— I don’t really know what the different species are, but I know when I see a really good Bramble patch! The ideal ones are really thin with hardly any thorns on them. They’re just magic. I love them because they’re available everywhere, and they’re hated as a weed. No one’s going to mind if you harvest them— they’re more likely to thank you for taking them away! You can extract fibres in the summer; you can use the vines in the winter; they provide fruit in the autumn; they smell amazing; they’re incredibly versatile. Yeah, I love them.

Once she’s collected her materials, what’s the next stage? Can you just come in from the field and start weaving? There’s almost nothing in basketry that you use straight away. It’s all about how you dry the materials out— you’re trying to get rid of as much moisture as you can so that it doesn’t deteriorate, but also so that when you go to make your basket it doesn’t shrink. As it’s losing moisture, it’s shrinking; if you make a basket with something you’ve just harvested, all that shrinkage is going to happen within the weave and the weave will become loose. Different materials have got different drying times and techniques. With Grasses, I put them in a sheet, not too much in one bundle, and hang it, and then I just shake it and turn the Grass so that it’s getting air to it. Ideally you want to dry something without direct sunlight hitting it, because that’s going to bleach it. You want to keep as much colour as possible. To get the thorns off Brambles, I use big fire gauntlets and run the vines through one way and then the other to strip off most of the thorns. Then I get jam jar lids and stab holes in them of different sizes, then run the vines through the holes to remove any that are left. Drying, prepping, resoaking— that’s the majority of the learning of the craft. The actual skill of making is a tiny part. I’m still learning; I destroy so many materials in my attempts! And it’s quite hard to find this knowledge, so a lot of it is just trial and error. You learn one thing and you think, right, maybe that applies to the next thing, maybe not...

The process of trial by error, of learning by doing, excites her; so too does the sense of continuity with the past. Basketry has a very long history, and it might be tempting to assume that its techniques are antiquated and fixed. Is there a tension between the idea of tradition and innovation in her craft? I think what is traditional is innovation. When I did anthropology at university, one of the recurring questions was about how similar ideas pop up in different places— whether knowledge had travelled between communities as a slow movement of ideas, or whether human populations spontaneously have the same ideas at different times and in different places. Through teaching, I’ve learnt that it’s a bit of both. I love that you can teach an idea and explain traditional techniques, but then people make such radically different things with the exact same materials and the exact same instructions. And conversely, when I teach braided basketry, every time I teach it someone will come up with the same idea without any prompting— “Ooh, I could make a handle like this...”. They’ll come up with something very similar every time, just by responding to the materials. I think it’s something that we miss out on as modern humans— problem-solving in that very tactile and immediate way. When you’re working with the materials and you’ve got a project, your brain is sparking and interacting with it, and also with your environment. You’re starting to see the possibility of the materials, the possibility of what’s around you. And then that triggers another thing: you start to care more about your environment. We protect what we use; we protect what we have a relationship with and understand. That’s why making and doing and building relationships with plants is so important to me.

So, there’s a conservation element to her work? Yes, she says, and a therapeutic one. She is currently working with Coed Lleol, the Welsh branch of the Small Woods Association, on their Trywydd Lach (Outdoor Health) project, a programme of activities to improve mental health; she also works with an anti-racist organisation that offers therapeutic residential retreats to those experiencing the UK Government’s hostile environment. Creating opportunities for outdoor experiences is, she believes, a social justice issue: I’m really interested in access to land— who has access to land, who has access to building a relationship with land. These can be complex, sensitive questions, especially in Wales where there’s a complicated history and, in some ways, tension between local people and incomers. What I like about my work through Coed Lleol is that it’s bringing people who maybe don’t have access to land into wild spaces to build relationships, when they might otherwise not be able to do that. That’s really important to me, whatever way we do it.

Being in the wild, getting to grips with the materials on hand— this is Jeanette’s ethos. To be a basket maker, you have to get your hands dirty; you have to be tactile and fully present: You can’t wear gloves for basketry. You need to really feel the materials. I don’t have very ladylike hands— they get quite roughed up! But I quite like that. I don’t mind it at all.

For more information about Jeanette’s work, visit www.weavingwild.co.uk

Follow her on Instagram: @weaving_wild

Images: Jeanette Gray