Statement:
I define a basket as an object, often a vessel shape, created in a textile structure where the dynamics of each component are visible. My expanded definition includes anything implying a relationship to basketry in its technical, aesthetic or functional terms. To me, that vocabulary includes: lines bent, looped, passed under, over, crossed. Resilience. Flexibility. Self-supporting, standing, rigid. Planes folded, bent, layered to obtain volume. Drawing lines in space. Filling space. Eliminating material to form space into parts. Accumulating spaces into a large whole. Enclosing, containing. Shifting dimensions. Repetition: rhythm, texture, pattern. Order, disorder. Joining, connecting, binding. Disassembling, screening, enhancing. Curiosity: package, trapping or wrapping space. Sphere: bind around, bundle. Handle: carrying. Hanging: pressed, weighing, balancing. Cutting, peeling, piecing. Breaking, unweaving, making holes.
I am preoccupied with space, textuality, structural surface and architectural quality. I think a form reveals richer aspects when it is viewed not only in terms of the real materials such as sticks or bark, but in terms of space or holes in which real material is not present. The matter of basket structure might seem to deal only with material or technical domain which is not relevant to me. But I now know that structural interplay of the material’s property and constructing method works creatively only when I personally become conscious of its nature, merits and limits. It is dependent on how I see and think. The finished object reveals clearly how I have changed from what I was before I made the piece.
I call myself a basketmaker because I inform my work by thinking and processing the nature and history of basketry. And also, because in order to realize the ideas, I choose to use materials and structural methods that have typically been used for basketmaking. It pleases me that my ideas and the final results of my work expand the boundary well beyond what I once thought of as the domain of basketry.
Hisako Sekijima |
