Only Closer

by John Edwards

Erie Art Museum Catalogue, September 2003 to February, 2004

First she's a basket maker. First and foremost, and still. First she makes coiled baskets, precise, neat, colorful. Then she covers the exteriors, skins them in paper, paint and texture.

And her point is that when you approach them, they are—what. Ceramic. You can't tell. Adorned with leather, leaves, and beads. But when you look inside, there are fiber coils. Discovery, magic. To perform this magic you have to pick them up, handle them. That's what the paper and paint were there to protect and to allow in the first place.

Now the baskets are set in little niches, precisely their size, made for them. The niches are cut into slabs made for the wall. To be seen. Hands off, the discovery inside no longer possible, no longer permitted.

So the secret of the baskets has been buried. Is this a cenotaph. Are these baskets votive offerings. Do they hold invisible remains. Are they empty?

She turns them upside down and they become people sometimes, seeds usually, peas in a pod waiting their chance. That chance doesn't always come, and she replaces them with rocks at times. Take your pick. Life or death.

Or perhaps history. The niches open up and grow, like seeds germinating, to become shelves on which histories unfold. Left to right, birth to death. Along the way, milestones of books, pencils, and yes, still baskets. If it wasn't about baskets first and last, she’d have abandoned them long ago.

Calligraphy scrubbed on the slab faces suggests stories but doesn't actually tell them, because they are not words. It's a kind of automatic writing, the impulse—the desire—to write, to tell the story, but restrained or thwarted, the shell of the story remaining.

Her work suggests a life that allows for orderly shelves, humor, craft, and wordplay. Yes, and orderly shelves.

Some of her baskets have lids. Some lids are stones, sealed tight. What's a basket anyway. Is a basket about what's in it, or what might be. Or what once was. You pick: the Holder or the Held.

***

The first piece I saw was "Fogbound," a small basket with a complex woven skin set in tiered fields of faint violet squares, and my immediate reaction was, "Michelangelo." I thought of his columns in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library, buried in the walls, a tension of compressed force much like his unfinished "Slaves," bodies trapped in stone struggling to break free. In Michelangelo's case that energy, forever entombed, was sexual. I considered the compressed energy in "Obsession," "Rare Earth," "Winter Sea." I looked at "Hymn," ("him"/"hymen"), its phallic power combining both male and female sexual energy within a Tantric urn. Hymn, him, hymen.

Or maybe not. Perhaps the baskets have been set apart for special use. The niches, after all, have evolved to fit the baskets, not the other way around—regardless of what "Origin of Species" has to say. Or again, maybe not.

What comes first, the basket or the niche. Do they shape each other. The niches evolve and grow as much as the baskets do. In "Tea," with its maps and its long look back, there’s no tea in those baskets. There never was. And what's more important anyway. The container or the contained. This seems to be the question. And her answer. She doesn't quite believe in the survival of the soul, that's what I think. Perhaps not even the soul itself.

But she believes in carcass and carapace and shell. If there's anything else, you'll have to supply it. And if there isn't—if under the comfort of the domestic, there is darkness?

Robert Frost would have understood her in a heartbeat.

***

Earth-tone and chi-quivering sack, boxes, earth tomes and virgin vessel. Go ahead, look inside. The hat is empty. See, folks. Step right up. The magician's hat is empty. Her father was a magician. Presto change-o! A rabbit. Fortunate fecund magic. And just when you thought the hat was empty. Following in his footsteps, she shows you the abyss and at the last second: Abracadabra! Life! But not life. Something that waits for life. Some Ur-book, unreadable in principal and meant to stay that way. A cup for life full of whatever you put into it.

Her baskets wait like little boats at dock. Safe and sound.

Or maybe not. Maybe adrift, empty and rudderless, lost in an empty sea. And Poof! The rabbit's gone. The hat is empty again.

Apparently you can read a book by its cover. Why do you buy a basket anyway. If a cardboard box would do the trick. Some Puritan strictness about the utility of beauty and the beauty of utility. We cold talk for a long time about primal and ancient and traditional and folk. We'd use words like Anasazi and Yoruba. We'd say reeds. We'd say birch bark. We'd say hemp. We'd say Pueblo and Shinto. You’d say Feng Shui and laugh as though you hadn’t meant if. I'd say Martha Stewart and laugh as though I had.

We look at these stories and we say color-field and minimalist in order to avoid admitting we are squinting for the Grand Design. We say vignette and snapshot, feeling again that these stark, ectoplasmic fuse boxes are more about the maker than the made. The omniscient hunter says "I", and we become I, the disembodied eye, who has to work hard to figure out what the story is about.

We say, "desert" or we say "hearth and frosted windows." And these archeological earth-tone-poems shape-shift with the words. And the story plays. This one is about—

We who squint for meaning and purpose in return for the Ah Ha! moment, discover that Hunter has been there ahead of us. All she asks is that we slow down a minute and tell a story, or listen for the echo of one told.

John Edwards is the former director of the Erie Art Musuem, Erie, Pennsylvania.