Annemarie shows me the beautiful lines she can draw with a single willow rod in the field.
“I absolutely have to live in this creative way to be sane. It is how the world makes sense to me.”
Annemarie shows me the beautiful lines she can draw with a single willow rod in the field.
“I absolutely have to live in this creative way to be sane. It is how the world makes sense to me.”
“I like how you can draw a line with the willow,” Annemarie O’Sullivan says as we stand in her willow plot near the village of Horam, in the south of England, and she bends a straight stem that is taller than both of us into a gentle curve. To get here, we walked from a small parking lot, past a lake, and through hilly woodlands blanketed with ramsons and bluebells. The site is a former brickworks made available to local artists and small-scale farmers by its owner (a biodynamic land trust) under the umbrella of a program called Sacred Earth.
Annemarie makes baskets as well as large installations and site-specific work out of willow, which is why she began growing twenty-plus varieties in long rows on her half-acre allotment here in 2011. We are visiting in May. Over the course of several weeks during the previous winter, her husband, Tom McWalter, cut, sorted, bundled, and labeled about three truckloads of three- to ten-foot or longer stems (or rods), and gradually hauled them back to their home in Isfield, twenty minutes away. There he left them to dry under cover for six months to a year, ready and waiting for Annemarie to select, prepare, and weave them one by one into her desired forms. Annemarie typically joins him for the harvest, but this season she was too occupied filling orders for the New Craftsmen, the London gallery that represents her, and for customers who order directly from her website. Though the work of the harvest is cold, wet, and physically demanding, Annemarie would have preferred to have been part of it. “We are nature,” she tells me, and living in sync with nature’s resources and cycles—growing willow, making baskets, being outdoors—is how Annemarie finds peace.
Annemarie’s baskets are in high demand, and she doesn’t keep many of them around. “The day a basket is made, it goes out,” she explains. “The joy is in the making, and letting go isn’t hard.” Here she is carrying greens from the garden in a cyntell (a traditional Welsh agricultural basket) that she made for her own use.
Regarded as one of the United Kingdom’s top basket makers, Annemarie is, in fact, relatively new to the medium. On a whim in 2004, needing even a brief respite from mothering a two-year-old boy while pregnant with another child, she enrolled in a one-day course in nearby Brighton. Immediately she felt drawn to the materials, motions, and rhythm of basket making—and to the practicality of creating a utilitarian object. Within six months, she had given birth to her second son, resigned from her teaching job at a Buddhist-based primary school, and enrolled in a part-time comprehensive basketry program at City Lit, an adult-education institute in London. For the next five years, she commuted back and forth to London one day each week for her on-site coursework, all the while feeling like she was doing exactly what she ought to be doing even though, at the time, the likelihood of making a living as a basket maker seemed remote at best. In many ways, it ran completely counter to what she was raised to believe possible. But, she says today, “I absolutely have to live in this creative way to be sane. It is how the world makes sense to me.”
Annemarie grew up in Ireland, on the outskirts of a village in County Meath, about forty miles north of Dublin. “I was brought up in a religious, fear-driven, and controlled environment,” Annemarie recalls. “And I was very well behaved for the wrong reasons.” The youngest of five children, she was good at art but was told by her parents that she couldn’t pursue it because it wouldn’t lead anywhere worthwhile. “I was academic, so the idea was that I could do something much ‘better,’ ” she remembers. Annemarie always found refuge being underwater and swimming and, at fifteen years old, in 1987, was Ireland’s national backstroke champion, though her athletic aspirations were halted when she injured her shoulder the following year. She went on to earn a degree in sports science as well as a primary-school teaching certificate from Loughborough University in England.
Spending time in the water, however, remains an integral part of Annemarie’s life, and she tries to make time for a dip in a pool, river, or the sea daily. Her affinities for both swimming and basket making are, she says, closely related. She cites the rhythm and repetition and the meditative state they evoke, the connection to the natural world, the full-body physicality required, and the way both forms of movement entail, at their essence, making lines. “When I’m making and in my state of flow,” she explains, “I’m repeatedly drawing a line with my hand. And when I swim, I always see that same hand going into the water and drawing a line. That for me is incredibly peaceful. Drawing a line over and over. That is the right place for me.”
When Annemarie (here with photographer Rinne Allen) began working with willow, she had access to only a couple of varieties. “They would arrive sprayed with chemicals and wrapped in plastic. I just felt like there was something inherently wrong,” she recalls. By sourcing cuttings from basket makers in England and Ireland, as well as some from beds in Lewes that she traced back to the sixteenth century, she is now able to grow nearly fifteen hundred plants in twenty-plus varieties without any pesticides. “Mine are much wonkier and more colorful than any commercially available,” she says. They range in color from gray to light pink to red to black, varying a bit depending on the growing conditions each year. When the plants are ready to be harvested in late winter, they are between three and ten feet tall, depending on the variety. Annemarie and her husband, Tom, cut them down and, over the course of a few weeks, haul them away.
When I ask Annemarie about sources of inspiration for her work, she starts with the expected—the rich history of basket makers and their wares—then detours to Picasso’s very simple line drawings and to skeletal forms that don’t necessarily need to be filled in. She is, as we speak, completing the circular base of a large harvest basket. Rods of willow are radiating several feet outward from the center. She lifts and gathers them together, then contains them within a circular hoop that Tom has steam bent for her out of local sweet chestnut wood. Next she will begin the weaving, around and around, and the basket will start to take shape. “It is chaotic for a while, then it all becomes more ordered. Then we trim it, and it becomes this neat, quite small and restrained object. I love the rules of this, but I love making my own rules, too,” she says. Her intention is to reach such a high level of technical mastery that she can then relax and become playful without sacrificing quality. “It’s important to me that my work is well crafted, that it isn’t just an art piece. It needs to be strong,” she explains.
Annemarie’s desire for playfulness is perhaps most evident in her site-specific work, such as Cluster, a series of spherical forms so large that they could easily be walked in and out of and that she and a team of volunteers wove out of sweet chestnut for an interactive installation at a former church turned art gallery in Brighton. Or a quartet of willow fish traps, or putchers, she and Tom wove and suspended on sweet chestnut posts over a lake at Forde Abbey, a historic estate in Somerset.
Tom studied product design at university, then worked building stage sets and artist studios and as a landscape designer. He has been collaborating with Annemarie full-time since 2017. He also handles, as Annemarie puts it, most family “shopping, cooking, and washing up, and gets the boys to wherever they need to be, all the socks in the right place.” Their artistic and economic goals for the basket making are deeply intertwined with their family life and values, and Annemarie is sensitive to the inevitable impulse to work more. But, she says, “I don’t want to grow into some big business. I want to be healthy, and I want the space and time to enjoy being here.”
The studio is a new structure that Tom built on the property, in between the house and the garden and greenhouse. The doors were repurposed from the house. The furnishings were all found, most at the recycling center in Lewes.
Annemarie strives to be present—both in the moment and literally here on this land and with her family. Together, she and Tom have been renovating their sixteenth-century house since they bought it in 2012; they grow much of their own food and heat their home with wood they chop themselves. When they do travel, either with their sons or on their own, their trips usually involve swimming, cycling, or hiking and also some sort of basketry. Together they have searched for hazel and sweet chestnut baskets in the French Pyrenees and learned a specialized frame basket technique from a maker in Northern Ireland. While Annemarie was visiting her sister in Queensland, Australia, she had the chance to meet an aboriginal family whose heritage includes some of the very first baskets in the world. “They are still working with the same fibers, on the same land, making the same pieces of work that have been made for hundreds, if not thousands, of years,” Annemarie recalls. The experience, she says, “was like gold dust, it is so rare. Lots of people dip into basket making like it’s a sweeties shop, but these people have passed it from one generation to the next to the next. There is an unbroken lineage,” she says, a line that reminds her that for tens of thousands of years, basket making was an essential skill used to make vessels of all sorts—to hold and transport everything from young children to berries to herring in Sussex where she lives today to the potatoes she remembers digging as a child in Ireland, and even the ammunition used in World War II.
By studying historic baskets, Annemarie is learning how people lived decades, centuries, and millennia ago. By copying their baskets, she is teaching herself skills. And by designing and making new baskets, she is drawing a line that connects her to them and to the present, to the here and now, to the natural universe to which we all belong.
In 2012, Annemarie and Tom bought this sixteenth-century house, and they have been restoring it themselves ever since. About reworking some of the wattle-and-daub walls, Annemarie says, “To go outside, come in with a bunch of big willow, weave a wall panel, then go out and get some earth maybe with straw and some horse manure, mix it up, slap it on, and push it into the weave to make a wall—that feels amazing and really right.” Her two teenage sons, she admits, “would like to live in a shiny new house with a big TV.”
On a wall above the kitchen and living room in the house, Annemarie displays her collection of baskets made by others.
the beginnings of a harvest basket
When Annemarie is ready to start a new piece, she chooses the rods she desires from the dried willow in storage, then submerges the willow in a long trough of water—one day per foot in length—to soften it; next it is left standing for another day to drain off excess water. To make a strong base, she cuts rods to her desired lengths, lays sticks out in a slath (or grid) underfoot, then “ties them in” with a pair of weavers. Through her art practice, Annemarie has found a way to grapple with and explore order and disorder—in basketry and in herself. There is a history (even a long-standing, rule-driven British guild system) to look back on, there are techniques to be learned (then riffed upon to drive unique creative expression), and there are natural materials to be respected and manipulated (but never completely tamed).