Basketry artist Shannon Lucas Westrum of Bemidji is the featured artist through March 1 in the Armory Gallery in Park Rapids.
A basketmaker for about 25 years, Westrum was a 2023 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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“As part of this grant, I proposed I would do six low-cost workshops and a solo exhibition,” she said. The workshops included one each in Park Rapids, Grand Rapids, Williams and Bagley and two in Bemidji.
“This exhibition is what’s coming out of that,” she said. “Part of what’s going into the show are the baskets that I created in each workshop, to show the participants their steps. Also, working on a reflection of life in the northwoods.
“It’s a combination of vessels, vases and stylized pieces – leaves, reeds in the water, things like that.”
Westrum said she typically builds her basketry around such items as a piece of driftwood or a deer antler, using rattan reed. “This year, I’ve been working on collecting a lot more locally sourced materials,” she said – enlisting family members and social media contacts to collect day lily leaves, cattails, rhubarb skins and chives, for a few examples.
“I’ve been making cordage and things out of that,” she said. “Those are not structural, but fun accent pieces. They add that fun detail or decorative aspect, lots of color and texture.”
Westrum described her style of basketry as creating frame baskets, where the frame forms a basic structure and the weaving fills it in. She said her work ranges from vessels for practical use to abstract or representational artworks.
“The baskets that we did in the workshop,” she said, “have a driftwood handle and a frame. They sort of act as a berry basket or a mushroom picking basket, and they’re totally functional. But some people use them for decorative pieces as well.
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“I go both directions in my work. The ones that are more vessel-like are more practical shapes. The sculptural pieces are just decorative accents.”
Her work ranges in size from willow or popple bark pieces measuring, perhaps, 3 by 3 inches, to a sculptural piece she recently completed that measured 2 feet wide by about the same height. “Usually, they range in the 12 to 16 inches (range) in either direction,” she said.
Westrum considers her sculptural pieces to be on the abstract side. “I’m going more for a feeling,” she said, then a realistic representation. She takes inspiration from the colors and shapes she sees out her window, such as leaves in their fall colors.
“There’s golds mixed in with bright greens,” she said, “and multitudes of oranges and pinks and burgundies. The leaf is discernible, but the colors are really abstract because they’re reflecting that whole feeling.”
Discovering basketry
Westrum’s interest in basketry was born when she received a locally made basket as a wedding gift. It was made by the mother of the friend who gave it.
“It was practical,” said Westrum, “the sits-on-your-counter-and-holds-your-kitchen-towels kind of thing. But it had these really beautiful flowers added as embellishments on the outside. I thought that was the coolest thing.”
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Always interested in ways to organize and contain things, she became fascinated with the concept that she could make such things herself. “All baskets are handmade,” she said.
Her friend’s mother taught basket weaving through Bagley Community Education. Westrum took her classes for a couple years – before children came along.
“So, I diverted from taking classes and went my own way,” said Westrum. “There’s always a lot to learn. We still go to Grand Marais and take classes there. There was a willow group that used to meet in Iowa; I was always learning more about the techniques, the materials.”
Westrum admits that there are basketry groups all over the country, but a lot of them are doing similar things. Connecting with that Iowa group was about reaching farther to find out “what’s outside of the box, something I haven’t seen before.”
She even spent a month in Ireland visiting with traditional Irish willow weavers, including Joe Hogan, the author of “Basketmaking in Ireland.”
“It was fascinating,” said Westrum. “He said, ‘Tell me if you know how to do this,’ and I said, ‘I know how to do it my way, but I want to learn how to do it your way.’”
According to Westrum, archaeologists in Israel recently uncovered a basket that was determined to be over 10,000 years old.
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“But the techniques themselves are universal,” she said. “No matter where you’re at in the world, a basket weaver can look at something and understand how that’s made, and had they the appropriate materials and tools, could recreate it. I just find that to be absolutely fascinating.”
She called basket making and teaching “an entwining experience,” crossing communities, cultures, age and experience levels.
Basketry is people
“Baskets are about people,” Westrum said. “There was a time in our history when every town had a broom maker, a bucket maker and a basket maker. Or if they were more rural, every farm did their own. They made their own broom every spring. They made their own baskets out of whatever they had on hand. And those were the tools they used.”
At one point, she worked with a woman from the Catalonia region of Spain who was in the U.S. teaching basketry classes.
“She started out as a basket maker, just selling in farmers’ markets (where) the baskets she’s making are still everyday tools. I just love that concept.”
Hogan, she said, spent 40 years traveling from county to county in Ireland, learning folk weaving techniques – and then “he went completely abstract and started turning everybody on their ears.
“He could look at a basket and say, ‘That was probably made in the 1930s in Donegal,’ but then turned around and started doing these really fascinating pod shapes, using pieces of wood.”
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When she teaches, Westrum likes to limit the class size to 12, or better yet, eight. “I want to be able to go to a person and say, ‘Can I help you with this? Are you struggling anywhere?’” she said. “I can see everybody’s face, and see if there are questions. To see how, even if they haven’t voiced it yet, are you struggling with something, and can I pop by and try to help?”
She said that makes teaching and learning a traditional craft a very personal thing.
Career turning point
Westrum said she has been homeschooling her kids for the past five years. Now in high school and college, they help her run a little gift shop, and when she’s not homeschooling, she leads classes and does crafts on the side. She has two years of homeschooling left.
Besides basketry, she also makes jewelry and candles. “A lot of creatives do that,” she said. “They’re dabbling in all of the things. But basketry has been my primary arts focus for a number of years.”
She considers herself a mid-career artist. “I definitely have a number of years under my belt,” she said. “I don’t take commissions anymore, because … if I want to work with an antler, it’s hard for me to take someone else’s antler and convey to them what shape that antler’s going to take.”
Often, Westrum said, she starts a piece by spending time looking at an antler or a piece of driftwood, focusing on interesting details such as a band in its shape or a change in color. She sometimes uses the antler as a pedestal, sometimes as a handle or the bottom of a bowl.
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“I started off doing a very traditional, flat-reed square basket kind of feeling,” she said. “Now, even the vessels are usually a little bit asymmetrical or offsides, trying to pull that extra little piece of the local environment in there.”
She thinks she has a lot more territory to explore, experimenting with basket shapes.
“Basketry is interesting,” she said. “It’s now considered, by some people, art; by some people it’s craft; by some it’s a fiber art; but not everyone. They could be considered mixed media. It’s technically wood, if you want to get specific about it.
“But I’ve been looking at ways that basketry can be used in a slightly more sculptural perspective. Like, here’s my interesting driftwood. It’s going to sit on my desk for a few days until I figure out what I want to do with it, what’s the picture in my head. And I think there’s a lot to be explored, yet, in experimental basketry.”
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