Jeremy Frey and Basket Weaving
Accompanying the exhibition Jeremy Frey: Woven, in this iteration of The Workshop visitors can delve deeper into Frey’s creative process.
Tradition
Tradition is the passing on of practices such as basket weaving, from one generation to the next. Wabanaki basketry if the oldest continuous practiced art form in what is known today as Maine. Artist Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, born 1978) honors the tradition of basket weaving while innovating the process by creating stunning new forms and designs, and by experimenting with materials, color, and scale in a style he calls “cutting-edge traditional.”
Sourcing Materials
Frey works with various materials in his creative practice that honor traditional processes while using them in new ways. All of Frey’s baskets start as trees sourced from the north woods of what is known today as Maine. The wood of the brown ash tree is flexible and ideal for basket making. It is cut into splints that make up the core structure of a basket form. Other materials include birch bark, which is removed in thin sheets ad applied to basket designs as panels, often embroidered with porcupine quill designs. Coastal sweetgrass is braided in Frey’s baskets, and ceder bark and spruce roots are sometimes used as basket rims or braids. Frey even dyes specific ash splints with vibrant colors, and together, they form intricate radial, or circular, patterns.
To begin a basket, he sources his materials by traveling into the woods near his home and searches for a brown as tree to transform.
“Ash is flexible, supple, and represents a connection to the earth. It if the traditional material, and it is a sacred tree. It’s the embodiment of our physical history in Maine—there’s an emotional connection that goes deep.”
Process
HARVESTING Once a brown ash tree is chopped down for use, Frey removes the bark and pounds the log with the blunt end of an axe to access the tree's growth rings. The wood within the growth rings breaks into smaller splints, or strips, using a tool called a splitter. Frey might split them over and over depending on the size of the basket he wants. Splints that have been split to reveal the interior of the wood are smoother than unsplit ash, which has a fuzzy texture. These splints become the 'building blocks' of a basket form. Frey hones these strips into the sizes he wants using a gauge, a wooden hand tool with metal blades. He then soaks the splints of wood in water to make them more pliable for use.
MOLDS Basket molds help Frey weave around a shape to create baskets of varying sizes. Frey designs, carves, and builds all his own basket molds by hand, resulting in baskets that are unique in size and shape. Some are solid molds from a single piece of wood. Some are puzzle molds, which enable him to remove each piece of the mold through the basket's opening at the top in a particular order. Puzzle molds allow Frey to achieve precise forms. To weave large baskets, Frey builds hollow rib molds that look similar to wooden barrels. These baskets are then woven with the mold upside down so as not to crush the weave at the bottom of the basket.
WEAVING Any basket weave is created from two key elements: standards and weavers. Standards are the vertical structure of a basket. They are the splints that stand up around a basket mold. Weavers are splints that are woven horizontally over and under the standards. Frey innovates this idea with complex weaves, often inspired by forms found in nature, and by layering multiple weaves into a single basket.
Legacy
“Basketry is an art form that I can relate to in many ways. It is a part of my heritage, an art form that connects me to my relatives both living and past. For me to weave is a way of honoring my ancestors.”
Art and making have always been a part of Jeremy Frey’s life. He is a seventh‑generation knowledge keeper who comes from a creative family—many of whom are or were celebrated basket makers and culture bearers in the Passamaquoddy community. He grew up drawing, sculpting, and painting, and learned how to weave baskets from his mother, Frances “Gal” Frey (Passamaquoddy, born 1957). His uncle Moose (Fred Moore, Jr., [Passamaquoddy, born 1960]) taught him to forage, or find and source, his own materials for his art. On view here are examples of sturdy pack baskets used for hunting and fishing made by his grandfather, Fred Moore, Sr. (Passamaquoddy, 1933–2014). Frey’s sense of color was inspired by his wife Ganessa Frey (Penobscot, born 1982), a gifted basket maker known for her use of color and work in miniatures. In addition to these family lessons, Frey was deeply influenced by apprenticeships with the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (MIBA), an arts service organization founded in 1993 by Wabanaki weavers to preserve ash and sweetgrass basketmaking.
Interview with artist Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy, born 1978) to accompany the exhibition Jeremy Frey: Woven at the Portland Museum of Art.
This research was supported by a Craft Research Fund Grant from the Center for Craft
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (VMFA). Video by Briget Ganske. Interview conducted by Johanna Minich, Curator of Native American Art, VMFA, October 12, 2017.
Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), Deception, 2014, brown ash, cedar bark, spruce root, and dye. Additional images and video footage courtesy of the artist.
Activities
EXPLORE TRADITION
What traditions exist in your family culture?
Which traditions have survived or changed?
What role do you play in those traditions?
Installation materials are supported in part by Lila Hunt Davies, the Margaret Coleman Brown Fund, and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation.