Basketry and vegetal structures

There is something fascinating about weaving stalks of wood in order to create an object. I have been cultivating my own willow for some fifteen years and, each year, I gather the young colourful shoots. Then they must be dried, sorted, stored and, when the time comes to weave them, they are soaked in water for a few days, and sometimes for a week or more, in order to make them flexible. I peel part of the shoots to obtain white willow that I use in some of my pieces. I also work with roots (cedar, spruce, etc.) straw, grasses and bark as well as other types of trees and bushes, including hazelnut, ash, maple, blackberry and bramble bushes, etc.  I also like to combine basketry with other disciplines, particularly ceramics, which oppose the lightness of the vegetal fibres, the tranquil strength of the earth. In this sense, I also like the idea of working with other craftspeople since basketry also consists of weaving relations.  

I also create structures made of live willow, simple crossing hedges or other arrangements, sometimes functional and sometimes purely artistic. This practice, which involves both land art and basketry, is relatively new and remains to be discovered and explored.

Since, unfortunately, there is no structured training in basketry in Quebec, I had to learn the basics by myself and through a few short training periods with French masters who were visiting here. Recently, I was able to follow a short, on-line training with a teacher from Wales. Basketry is so varied, so diversified, depending on the regions in the world and the matters used that we can never entirely master the techniques. In my opinion, this is part of its fascination