NB:First published in Garland Magazine
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A room can never really be empty because it is always full
of potential. So too it is with any hunt. When a wispy white feather
rides upon the air currents, it just floating there can fill a vast room
– and especially so if it is a ‘whitebox’ art
gallery. That floating feather, or a memory of a sign on a fence, can
fill vast spaces right up. There will always be hints in the feather’s story,
even in a memory of a sign, just by it being there and almost inevitably there
is much to ponder upon.
Nothing is both impossible and an impossibility. So, what
seems to be an emptiness is nothing of the sort. In looking for missing
stories in a place’s history, basket making turns
out to be an exploration of a rich set of ideas– primordial storytelling
even. The stories attached to basket making are rich stories, surprising
stories, powerful stories, people stories, sometimes there are hidden stories,
and generally all of them speak of ‘place’ and quite
loudly.
Basket making, ‘wickery’,
is primordial and it seems that we all seem to have one or two pieces of
wickery somewhere in our lives. Interestingly, it seems that musingplaces –galleries
and museums – often do not know what do with wickery. Some ‘wickery
objects’ find their way into their history collections, some, and
only sometimes, find their way into ‘the decorative arts’ collections and
others can only be found in the exoticism of ethnographic cum anthropology
collections. In important cultural institutions, mostly it seems, it is just
easier to leave baskets out of the collecting process.
Wickery touches everyone’s lives in all kinds of ways. Yet
wickery is all so often made in the workplaces of the underclasses as they
labour away so very close to the material’s source. However, it is not like
that in Aboriginal cultural realities. And, eventually wickery will find its
way back to the earth somewhere –and always gently.
‘Wickery’ as a technology is at once
primordial and current. Despite ‘wickery’ speaking of a
particular sensibility towards materials, these sensibilities predate the
emergence of ceramics and metallurgy in human histories. Wickery has never lost
its currency across cultural divides down through time. It has become deeply
embedded in just about every cultural consciousness and social reality.
So when it turned out that the sign by the highway
proclaiming“Willow Basketry Here” belonged to one Leandro
Di Lullo it was kind of unsurprising. As his somewhat
extraordinary story began to unfold Leandro revealed himself as a man with his
roots in one place, yet someone at one with the world in another place a long
way away. Leandro was born in Abruzzo and
he found his place to live his life in Launceston.
In doing so, and with his basket making, he seemed to make all the connections
needed to make extraordinary baskets that somehow belong equally to Abruzzo and
Launceston.
It also turned out that Leandro’s sign was not the only one
proclaiming that you could buy willow baskets here. There was another sign
right across town that just a little earlier in time was broadcasting that this
is where you can get your‘Ballard
Willow Baskets’now. It turns out that Ivan Ballard was a
fourth-generation basket maker in Launceston. His ancestor, James Ballard, was
a convict who found himself in the basket business on the other side of the
world in Van Dieman's Land because of his sideline in horseless
highway robbery.
Despite being largely missing in Launceston’s social
histories, by the outbreak of WW1 the Ballard basket enterprise was 50 people
strong and touching Launcestonians lives in almost every way. At that time on
the other side of the world Leandro Di Lullo was born in a place almost
certainly unheard of by Launcestonians. Both Leandro’s family and the Ballard
family carried on a cultural tradition, and a technology, that reaches back in time
much further than it is possible for most of us to imagine.
In Launceston, it turns out that
if we take the time to look, there are unique relationship between our
placedness and wickery. Given Aboriginal and postcolonial sensibilities, local
histories and contemporary imperatives, baskets are as full of historic
and cultural contexts as they might be filled with laundry, fruit, flowers and
firewood. In the case of Tasmania's pakana and palawa people 'wickery' carried
eggs, shellfish, tools and nowadays cultural treasures. Wickery can figure
large in the cultural landscaping that makes and shapes place.
Over the course of a few months the hunt for Leandro’s
stories led to an exhibition project at Design Tasmania, Wicker
Wonderlust. Then came the revelation of an almost underground network
of wickery-makerssprinkled
throughout Tasmania along with a myriad of stories embedded in wickery and the
making of it. All these stories deserve to be told and better understood.
What the‘wickery search’revealed in part were
the tensions off to one side to do with ‘plastics’.
However, that is a long and complex story that demands a different paradigm to
help inform and develop new understandings. L:ikewise, new imaginings of
wickery may yet enlarge upon community based knowledge systems in the kinds of
ways that allowed ceramics and metallurgy to settle alongside wickery – and
quite comfortably.
Currently, the use of social media is critical to the
success of any investigation. Social media, and the rhizomic digital
connectivity it affords, provides a platform that facilitates new models of
connectivity and the effective sharing of stories. In this way, it is
possible to imagine that a‘neowickery’ might well evolve and
to be built upon the mobility and the ‘placedness’ found
in Leandro Di Lullo’s placedness and the Ballard family’s place in Launceston’s
history.
In a social dimension, ‘wickery’ is
typically, but not always, the work of the under-classes,
the invalids, the itinerant poor, et al. Outside very narrow social
paradigms, the maker’s name is typically quite unimportant and generally
unknown. Even with the so-called ‘Modern
Crafts Movement’of the 1960s/70s/80s ‘wickery makers’ very
often had no aspirations to be known as either ‘artist’ or ‘designers’. Accordingly,
their work, and quite often the ‘makers’ themselves,
were often overlooked.
Resonating within a ‘wickery’ sensibility
there is something like the philosophical pillar of ‘mingei’ to
be found in Japanese cultural production. ‘Mingei’ is "hand-crafted
art of ordinary people". Yanagi Sōetsu discovered
beauty in the everyday, the ordinary and utilitarian objects created by
nameless and unknown craftsmen.
According to Yanagi, utilitarian objects made by the common
people are"beyond beauty and ugliness". Typically,
the ‘mingei sensibility’ is to do with things
made anonymously, by hand and in quantity. Typically, it is relatively
inexpensive and used by ordinary people as part of their everyday daily life.
Consequently, mingei almost unavoidably reflects a placedness
via its materiality of place and the cultural landscape it originates
within – and in a way generates. Nonetheless, there is a kind of‘mingei
cum wickery’ equivalence to be found within cultural landscapes almost
everywhere.
Somewhat unexpectedly this is found in Launceston in Leandro
Di Lulllo’s work. In Tasmania, more generally it is also evident albeit
somewhat under the sweep of the cultural radar.
It seems that generally with wickery the objects are by and large
in daily use and thus there is an element a ‘wabi-sabiness’ about
a great many of – especially so in Leandro Di Lullo’s baskets.
So, when an empty room in a musingplace is somewhat unexpectedly
filled extraordinarily ordinary ‘objects’, typically
useful objects, that are as full of stories as they might be full of the ‘things’ that
need to be stored, you have a room filled with something almost undefinable. If
it is as a consequence of a hunt for the stories behind roadside
signage that too is extraordinary.
With the memory of that sign in a front yard along a
highway, that obscure‘basket maker’, Leandro Di Lullo, and
the hunt for him turned out to be a quite enlightening. The ordinary became
extraordinary and the everyday somehow became somewhat exotic. So, if there is
ever any doubt, remarkable storytelling, and a ‘completness’, can
be found in the simplest of things – wickery
especially.
Ray Norman 2018 for GARLAND ... Click here for Resume
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