Making baskets in devotion to the rhythms of the wild holy earth
The plant and animal bodies they hold, the lands that receive them, and the unfurling imagination. Reverently tended by hand, our willow patch supports our full weaving and creative practice - making baskets for life, death, and liminality.
We approach craft and growing willow as a form of ancestral communication - connecting us with the memory and voices of our beloved human and more than human dead to conjure strength, inspiration, emergent art, and fierce resistance and advocacy work.
We apply the ancient craft of willow basketry to the weaving of what we're calling "threshold vessels" or coffins and soul boats - inviting collaborative, healing pathways for some of our choices around death and dying, creation, consumption, and decomposition and crafting humans into a closer relationship with the integral cycles of birth, death, and decay.
-
Mo is devoted to willow and tending the living tradition of basket weaving. She is a mother, basket maker, teacher, lifelong apprentice 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 and later in Ireland - connecting her craft with the life of plants and ancestors. 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.
