About

Woven Thresholds is a collaborative project that applies the ancient craft of willow basketry to the weaving of what we're calling "threshold vessels" — that is, burial baskets, cradles, and willow baskets. The vessels are woven with willow grown, tended, and harvested by hand from local lands. This project brings communities into an intimate relationship with life, death, and beauty while also creating a collective, small-scale weaving practice that contributes to an economy of relationship. Following an apprenticeship with established Irish coffin weaver, Woven Thresholds was born from the desire to rebuild a culture of reciprocity with the Earth, crafting humans into a closer relationship with the integral cycles of birth and death.

 There exists a massive industry producing commodities around such human experiences as birth and death. Corporate greed and cultural amnesia leave families with the burden of unaffordable vessels that also poison the earth or an endless supply of baby-junk that's mass-produced, devoid of story, and reliant upon exploitative labor across the globe. Woven Thresholds is a response to the inert, extractive, and sterile over-culture, re-imagining instead a collaborative, healing pathway for some of our choices around death and dying, creation, consumption, and decomposition.  

Woven Thresholds is collaborative on several levels: working with the land where the willows are grown and harvested for weaving; creating a network of craftspeople and artists, midwives and doulas of both birth and death, natural burial advocates, burial conservation alliances, and of course the communities that experience the thresholds from the inside out. A small seed to plant with the long vision for any community that birth and death be returned to the hearts and hands of the people with the more immediate outcome of sharing the ancestral craft of weaving as a vessel for all life.

Woven Thresholds is the vision of interdisciplinary artist Maureen Walrath. Mo is devoted to willow and tending the living tradition of basket weaving as a response to the ever changing needs of the living world. She is a mother, basket maker, teacher, soft and fierce student of birth, death, burial, and blood mysteries, reverent farmer, and threshold worker providing care for her community in emergent ways through the vessels she weaves. She learned to weave willow baskets in the Coast Range of Oregon - connecting her craft with the life of plants. There she learned about willow, their growing rhythms and patterns, the harvesting and curing of the plant for weaving, and teaching others to weave. Mo is a guest on S’Klallam land in rain shadowed Port Townsend, Washington where cormorants dive and eagles tell glacial memory sky stories with ancestral lines from the west coast of Ireland and Main River lands in Germany.