Woven Communities: a case study of embodied craft practice and intergenerational knowledge of Scottish vernacular basketry

Abstract

Woven Communities is an AHRC funded collaboration between Stephanie Bunn of the Social Anthropology department, University of St Andrews, and craft practitioners from the Scottish Basketmakers Circle (SBC). While initially conceived to compile the knowledge (embodied and otherwise) of Scottish vernacular basketry accumulated since the SBC’s foundation 25 years ago, this academic and practitioner collaboration has rapidly developed new research pathways beyond any kind of retrospective approach, to tell an important story of intergenerational learning through embodied skill mediated through basketry, an everyday, constructed fabric of society. We would like to present the findings of the project so far as a case study of good practice, relevant to other crafts and design practitioners and educators.

The Woven Communities of this project interweave past and present Scottish basket makers’ concerns with those whose lives have entwined different domains of basketry knowledge through using baskets. From fisher-folk to crofters, Travellers to home industry workers, farmers to factory workers, curators, scholars, enthusiasts, craft professionals and ethno-botanists, all are a part of our woven community of practice. Museums have welcomed our group, providing new knowledge about collections. Our ancestors in this concern have ranged from practitioners to estimable curators such as Isobel Grant - collector of ‘homely Highland things’ for the Highland Folk Museum, Sandy Fenton, founder of the Scottish Life Archive, and Rintoul and Baxter, two bird-watchers who created the National Museum of Scotland’s unique basket collection while promoting classes for the Scottish WI. Our informants and researchers range from fibre artists and willow growers to contemporary crofters.

The story told by our project is not just textual, historical and photographic, but textured, embodied and practical. It is an exploration of the role of basketry practice in promoting a specific form of attention, thought and talk; of the dynamics of intergenerational ‘transmission’ of embodied knowledge and skill; of ‘the wanting to know’ and communicate past skills; and of the role of new media in communicating craft knowledge. Thus the project explores the nature of the craft’s skills and knowing, and how these skills underpin not just contemporary design, but provoke a specific form of engagement, thought and enquiry which incorporates its own regeneration. That is, as stated in the conference aims, basketry entails a ‘set of embodied potentialities’, acting as both a repository for accumulated human capacities for learning and as an agent for change.

In presenting our case study, at least two members of the research group, Stephanie Bunn and Julie Gurr, will aim to complement basketry practice with an account of the project and an exposition of its digital research. Our academic dissemination has required an acceptance of basketry practice during presentations and papers at conferences and symposia, producing an entirely different kind of discussion and attention and we will aim to do this at Making Futures. At the same time, we will show how our interactive, ongoing web-publication draws in old and new practitioners from Scotland and abroad, and continues to grow.