ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between growing and making baskets, focusing on the generation of different kinds of learning from cooperation, intergenerational relations and knowledge production to oral and social history, along with the practice of skill itself. Basketry is often seen as an unremarkable, rather homely craft, and its role in social life has been given little more than brief attention. In the United Kingdom (UK), early basketry research developed mostly in the basketry community. A defining moment in the growth of interest in basketry-as-art in Britain was the New Forms in Willow symposium at Ness Botanical Gardens, Cheshire, in 1991. A living willow sculpture incorporates processes of both making and growing. Research interest in basketry declined during the first half of the twentieth century in parallel with reduced production following the technological developments of the industrial and petro-chemical revolutions, especially after the Second World War.
