Tanned fish skin, antique keys, dried vines and other items have found their way into the baskets of a skilled rural Lewis County fiber artist who continues to experiment and study her craft.
“I took a basket-making class at a community college in 1980 and was immediately hooked,” said Ardith Hamilton, of Adna, who said she still has that first basket — along with others in her current collection of about 150 baskets, most of which she has made over the years.
A retired nurse who spent most of her career in emergency medicine, Hamilton is intrigued by both the form and function of weaving fiber into vessels or textiles.
“Baskets are interesting because people don’t always consider them as an art object. They’re used to buying baskets that are mass-made and inexpensive,” Hamilton said. “But baskets and the art of basket-making have always been part of human history.”
“When you think about it, even though they rarely survive to be found in archaeologic digs, baskets have been made since ancient times,” Hamilton said. “People had to make containers or vessels from materials around them, like grasses, reeds and sticks. How else would they carry things?”
Historically and worldwide, baskets from coastal areas were made from grass, tule or reeds, while those from mountainous areas were most often created from bark or wood. Due to the work of gathering and processing natural materials to weave baskets, those in antiquity were likely used until they eventually fell apart.
Showing a few of her baskets, Hamilton explained that cedar bark for basket-making is traditionally peeled in long vertical strips from trees that are under eight inches in diameter, otherwise the bark is too thick and stiff. The strips are rolled, dried for a year, then soaked, split into thinner strips and cut into the widths needed for basketmaking.
Rattan for basket-making comes from a vine that grows predominantly in Indonesia, where today factories process the vine fiber into reeds or wicker. The rise of exploration and subsequent trade between Europe and Asia centuries ago brought rattan to the West and later to America through colonists who brought rattan chairs or baskets with them. The baskets of Native American tribes continue to vary by region as highly symbolic art forms dating back at least 15,000 years.
Elevating her basketry with various materials and form, Hamilton sometimes incorporates beads, shells, tassels or other decorative items into her works. A rectangular cedar basket features a collection of jingling vintage keys around its perimeter. Wood frames or hoops are crafted from oak or birch.
An acquaintance offered some fish skin from Alaska, which had been tanned like deer hide with some pieces left in natural color and some dyed, and Hamilton has woven long strips of the soft, pliable skin into a few of her cedar baskets.
Not content to make only baskets of normal carrying size, as a master weaver she has perfected her art to also create perfectly formed miniature wire baskets with handles, measuring about an inch in diameter.
“I try to do different types of projects in weaving and like to experiment,” Hamilton said.
She also weaves scarves, runners, vests, jackets and wall hangings on a 36-inch floor loom that has eight shafts for creating intricate patterns and various textures.
Hamilton explained that threading the loom is time-consuming and that one thread in the wrong heddle (the device that each thread goes through) or in the wrong slot in the reed (the rack the threads go through at the front of the loom) can throw off an intended pattern.
Hamilton said the weaving of cloth was also undertaken by past societies worldwide, often with the various tasks in weaving delegated to different family groups.
She said floor looms are traditionally powered by weavers manipulating the shafts and foot pedals; some are powered by bicycles, and that the first mechanized machine was a loom. Early industrialized looms were built from iron and are credited with launching the Industrial Revolution and with the introduction of digital computing.
Accompanying nine other weavers on a three-week fiber arts tour to Uzbekistan a few years ago, Hamilton and the others viewed looms that were 25 feet in length and visited shops where as many as 40 artisans were using looms that pounded and clacked as cloth was woven by traditional methods.
Hamilton is a current member of the board and past president of the Olympia Weavers Guild, which was founded in 1945 and currently has 150 members. She participates in the guild’s annual Show & Sale held the first weekend of October at the Thurston County Fairgrounds, and her works can also be seen at The Rectangle Gallery in Centralia.
For more information about the guild, visit olympiaweaversguild.org.
