Winter Solstice Basketry

Grown on the site of Evergreen Brickworks since its opening in 2010 from plants which regenerate annually and are cut late in the spring. the red osier dogwood is an important food source for birds and the black willow can grow up to 12′ a year. Both are native species are planted to begin natural restoration of the the five acre redeveloped industrial pad.
Often these plantings are originally grown in nurseries who focus on maximum yield since plant growth is tied to profit, and so they are flooded with fertilizers. These are then planted out, and the odd original shape obtained by the greenhouse growth of the plant stays with it as it matures, and therefore the shape of this plant as we now recognize it is misleading. dogwoods and willows have evolved to be stimulated by cutting/burning especially when the leaves have fallen and the energy of the plant is stored under the snow, in its roots. the form of a coppice stump, as it grows straight long shoots, is a beautiful thing to behold. often trimmed by beaver and muskrat, these long shoots are ideal material for basketry, and so are a living free renewable resource, who’s value can be added to immensely when planted close to an environmental center like the Evergreen Brick Works has become.

see the video of youth harvesting the black willow:

by planting species which have the highest yield of environmental and economic functions, we can work towards rekindling understanding of the role of ‘coppice’ plants and trees in responsible urban business practices of the future.
through experimentation in the pilot brickworks artist residency program, the dogwood and willow baskets will annually be available for sale in the Evergreen Garden Market for the holiday season, under the name: Winter Solstice Basketry.

why living knotworks?

living pussy willow

This knot was harvested in cassandra public school while the snow was blowing over a workshop on planting a living willow tunnel for the evergreen all hands in the dirt forum. In four months I have woven around 150-200 knots mostly from the material harvested at cassandra.
Since I was 12 or so I have been drawing celtic inspired knotworks mostly drawn from the book of kells and similar, though I would get through a letter sized knot and lose patience after 3-4 hours, because the drawing had a predictable end.
As I have said elsewhere the willow knots are waste material because of the way the were pruned or chewed in years past, and are not prime for fencing or basketry. Each break in the leader shoot produces two or more off-shoots which are the structural basis for each knot, and there are few options for weaving and tying these knots other than in the configuration I have made them. The only limitation to this statement is that I have noticed through time that as I become proficient and evolve different means of attaching willow to itself, different patterns evolve.
This, coupled with the awe-inspiring male or female catkins (or in the case of the dogwood I am working with now rosette style flowers) followed by leaves, brings the impetus to continue making knots far beyond my early drawings.
I am not sure if you have looked at the book of kells, but many of the illuminated knots represent animals, people or other symbols, and in this practice I will continue to create increasingly representational forms.
The first experiments have taken forms of insects, but recently I made a small beaver out of red osier dogwood.
Literally every day I am learning from the progressive revelation of growing stems and leaves, which I think of as knots growing out, like problems solving themselves.
I will post more revelations as they progress, hopefully into massive scale living representatives of animals subsisting on willow and dogwood in the don (like the beavers living in the mud banks of the don-1.5m long!).

One knot at a time though. 🙂
Morgan Zigler.

willow also from cassandra public school

http://www.foolishnature.org

‘leftover and invasive’ tree baskets

of mantoba maple, willow and sugar maple

of pine limbs tied together last christmas, and cob

as seen on:

http://www.bestgreenblogs.com

speaking of cedar…

from the last post, about making children’s spaces for the ymca in brampton, i had many opportunities to articulate the challenge of bending cedar saplings into a tunnel, using the inner bark to re-mediate head entrapment worries (as per csa standard) and getting to grip with this eastern white cedar, i recollected something.

sometimes one needs to be in the position to say things out load to really absorb them. i said to a number of people, “i had no idea if it would work, but had already invested days in harvesting, energy in transporting it to the childcare space, and it was not until the moment of bending the first two over and around each other, using unknown muscles to form and shape the poles and distribute pressure so that they would not break, that i knew it would indeed succeed. ”

along with this tirade about cedar, came the shortened version

“i have not worked with cedar in this way, so intimately, since i was 15. ”

it is this second phrase, uttered for humor, and possibly to solicit interest in the tree-too often we are wandering in a grey landscape without differentiation, seeing only colors and hard surfaces, patterns, as when you blur your eyes looking out of the subway, and i would love to bring at least one or two beautiful things in focus a day-that inspired this post. the pictures that surround and follow this post are from a humble and beautiful place, tucked back near a couple of lakes on the southern lower steppes of a dormant volcano in the interior of B.C. near a little town called Salmon Arm, where i grew up. The farm which housed this ‘first nations outdoor classroom’ was the stage which, i am now slowly realizing 14 years later, the primary experience which drew me into the intricacies between the living environment and our relationship in deriving use out of it. long story short, it is the small property where it all started for me, as an artist, educator, and whatever else i am.

one reason for me attaching significance to this place and these images is that this are taken in december of 2011, meaning that the structure pictured, and the little birch bark ties inside of it were made when i was 15, and have been holding the space together for the last 14 years. This is in stark opposition to conservative reality. one would not think that the work we do to fill the summer when we are 15 will last through the coming decades, and have other youth, children and the community in general glean learning an understanding from the ‘recreation’ of this native winter home. one would expect that the time you spent washing dishes when you were 15 would be remembered for roughly the next 14 minutes, not years. this has been a consistent ethical litmus test, to determine the usefulness of my work, and of myself in a community setting…….is it still standing and who interacts with it now.

there are few more soulful activities than wandering through a space you have effected, and seeing that effect still in place years later, standing still and steadfast through numerous seasons and outside and removed from the affected pace of modern north american human culture.

finding a way to make a fence from the land

this is a 6 month project, which may seem a little extreme for a smallish fence, but it was all harvested by hand through connections with landowners @ http://algonquinagroenergy.com near mattawa, Ontario, and build with hand tools. This 150′ fence was designed from British hazel ‘hurdles’ which were 6′ high and were staked into the earth as garden or sheep fencing for at least two thousand years. This patio for Cafe Belong is instead sunk into rough cedar logs with sugar maple upright to make it modular and portable.

to begin, in February to harvest from 400 acres north of Algonquin park was ambitious, but to find the necessary connection to a piece of land, o be able to visit and understand it, who lives there what has grown where and why is half of what is important, and without the pointers to understanding, there is little inspiration to continue creating things that i harvest.

this willow was cut off of a five acre site which had been entirely graded 5 years ago, and even though we had access to gas powered machinery such as the infamous ‘brush hog’ it did not seems to help, the process of selection being so slow and refined, taking only those saplings of a certain age or width meant that we could not just cut the entire thing down, but picked the trees one at a time. there is no machine more efficient than the head, heart and hands for this.

4 months later in June i am still installing fences, benches and arbors out of the leftovers. above is Access Alliance Children’s Garden, installed in May of 2012.

i even went so far as to construct a fence in two dimensions as a bench for Merchants of Green Coffee, though as the season progressed the material, pussy willow, white ash, and sugar maple, would progressively dry out and become harder to work with.