Alex Rooted - Willow Basket Weaver

Alex Rooted is the name my friend Alex weaves unde. On a grey afternoon, with the trees still bare, my son Flynn and I went to see her, and these are the photographs we came home with.

Who is Alex Rooted?

Alex makes her baskets by hand, from willow, and they are not the kind of thing you keep behind glass. They have handles meant for carrying and bases meant to be set down full on a kitchen floor. Then you look closer and the colour starts to move: bands of green and rust and a soft silvery brown running through the weave, and handles twisted like rope. They are made to be used for years, and they look it.

We've been friends a long time, and a good deal of that friendship has happened with a camera between us. We've made films together in a lot of places, including New York, where we spent time with urban farmers for a series of short pieces. It's a little funny that after all that travelling, some of my favourite pictures of her were made on a wooden porch, with baskets stacked all around her.

An afternoon on the porch

The cabin sits under tall firs, and smoke was curling out of the stovepipe. Willow leaned in tall bundles against the porch posts. Baskets filled the shelves, and big woven rounds hung on the wall behind her, ringed with rust and green like the cross-section of a tree. Flynn stood in the middle of the baskets in his red bandana as if someone had put him in charge of them.

Watching her hands

Alex works low, with a basket in her lap or on the porch boards, so most of the morning happened down at that level, close enough to watch her hands. She draws a long rod through the weave so easily it hardly looks like work, and then you notice the basket is a little further along than it was a minute ago. There's more work like this on my photography page.

Thank you, Alex, for having us, and for letting Flynn inspect every basket in reach. There are more stories like this one in the journal.