Welcome

Hello and welcome to my new blog!
Let's start with a little bit about me....


Why do I do what I do? My immediate reaction to this question is to avoid it and bury my hands and my mind in a pile of burnt engine wire and create a basket. That’s why I do what I do: to explore, to experiment, to work with the strengths and weaknesses of the material to create baskets that use ordinary and discarded materials that reflect the ordinary things around us…baskets that are fragile yet strong…baskets that change with the touch of a handle or the angle of a sunbeam….baskets that make one think…think about form, material, structure, and function from a different perspective…baskets that are whimsical…baskets to enjoy.

I have always been a collector and an organizer. Each collection needs its own special container…different things for different collections. It has now gone full circle…the collections have become the baskets.

I learnt to knit as a child growing up in Australia. We all knitted. We took our knitting to school and sat around at lunch, knit one purl one. For years my knitting was always functional - jumpers, mitts, socks – very functional for the place I was living in at the time - Newfoundland off the northeast coast of Canada. It was there that I started creating my own designs and won several awards. On moving to Nova Scotia the plan was to develop a small cottage industry based on my original knitwear designs. Then I discovered basketry!!!

Nova Scotia has a long history of basket making which the Nova Scotia Basketry Guild helps keep alive. Courses are offered in European traditional basketry making as well as in contemporary basketry. Such greats as Lissa Hunter, Lois Walpole, Hisako Sekijima, and Arline Fisch have stopped to do sessions with a room full of fanatics. And down the road on Deer Island off the coast off Maine is Haystack Mountain School of Crafts – a summer haven for artists. There I had the opportunity to study further with Lissa Hunter and on another occasion with John Garrett – both such brilliant basket makers and such caring, sharing, and supportive people.

As time has gone on I have explored more and more non-traditional materials and non traditional techniques…now everything from airline coffee spoons to seaweed stems washed onto the beach after a storm to steel prongs from the street cleaners, is fair game, either by itself or in combination with other elements, including rust caused by weathering on my back step.

Underlying all this experimentation with materials, techniques and structure is my passion for the environment. This plays an important, often subconscious, part in the materials of choice and the final forms of my baskets.