The Basket, Remixed.

Our era is, wonderfully, revisiting the handmade. New works celebrate the power inherent in handicraft, emphasizing the value of artisan labor and craft techniques while demonstrating a profound shift toward more sustainable products and practices. Ultimately, it’s about interpreting old techniques in a new way, and one of the loveliest iterations of this revival can be found in a handful of international collaborations between modern designers and traditional craftspeople focusing on none other than the humble basket, an object with a history nearly as long as our own.

From warm, earthy hues to shocking neons, beautiful baskets are popping up the world over, thanks to handwoven unions of form, function, and contemporaneity that also provide inroads to fight poverty and the oblivion of artisan techniques. Below, some of our favorite standouts:

The Etsha Baskets

This collection is the result of a collaboration between Canadian designer Patty Johnson and the Etsha Weavers Group, a collective formed by female weavers from the Etsha Villages. Descendants of the Hambukushu refugees of southern Angola, their villages occupy part of the land originally conveyed to their relatives in the 1970s by the Botswana government. Based on African coil basketry, the Etsha baskets merge time-honored Angolan weaving skills with exceptional dyeing techniques from Botswana through dedicated and patient labor. Entirely crafted from the fiber of the Mokola palm tree, first a row is woven, then a hole is pierced through it with an awl, into which a strip of dyed palm is inserted and wrapped around the core. As this process is repeated, exquisitely refined patterns emerge.

According to Johnson, “What sets the Etsha weavers apart is the quality of their work and the motifs they use. In part traditional, the weavers also invent new motifs all the time.” With the group, the Toronto-based designer carefully examined local historic baskets and the Etshas’ traditions as weavers, looking at classic motifs and playing with their scale. “We decided on a single size,” she recalls, “and we developed a simple color palette based on their natural dyes. With those parameters, the women working on the project made their own decisions on color, motif placement, and edge detail.” The intriguing results not only please the eye with their graphic beauty, they also have a light, yet striking, pleasant smell.

Tikau Light Collection

Like Johnson’s collaboration, Finnish company Tikau’s basket project began with recognizing an opportunity to simultaneously highlight craftsmanship and empower traditional makers in underdeveloped communities. The Helsinki-based company, along with its NGO, Tikau Share, commissioned Ilkka Suppanen to work with an artisan community in rural Orissa, near Mumbai. The result is a series of unique bamboo wicker lamps in various sizes that merge Scandinavian design and Indian handicraft traditions with innovative LED technology and fiber optics to obtain both sustainable and energy-saving lighting solutions.

Etsha basket weaving © Karin Duthie / Illustrative Options
Man Made

New York designer Stephen Burks’ multifaceted works have caught our eye many a time, and his new Man Made collection—set to launch in the spring of 2014—is another bright offering. Born out of a collaboration with Senegalese basket weavers based in New York and Dakar, Man Made combines traditional artisan craft with contemporary industrial design. A particular standout from the series is Starburst Lamp, a cluster of baskets built from spiraled sweetgrass and stitched together with colorful strands of recycled plastic, which Burks strung together with bulbs.

Bow Bins

Cordula Kehrer’s Bow Bins are chimeras of mass-produced plastic buckets and handwoven natural wickerwork. The German designer found both materials to be widely available internationally, offering the fantastic possibility to be produced in multiple underdeveloped countries where handicraft and tradition still subsist and can be involved in the process.

Bask

Sebastian Herkner presents a more classical take on the woven basket, but with a surprising material. For his Bask collection, the German designer found inspiration visiting a paper factory in Spain that produces paper yarn used mainly for handles of shopping bags. Together with Italian furniture company Moroso, Herkner developed a technique that makes the yarn more resistant in order to be suitable for three-dimensional products like Bask.

The hand-made series consists of baskets in a variety of forms and sizes, constructed from metal structures thread with the colorful paper yarns. Each basket holds a dual function: Upside down they can also be used as small side tables.

Johnston's Archer Density Basket © Doug Johnston

Density Baskets

Brooklyn designer Doug Johnston’s Density Baskets are made from cotton cord that is coiled and stitched with an industrial sewing machine in Johnston’s studio. The density of the stitching varies to create embroidery-like patterns on the basket surface. “We have a set of dimensions for each piece, and we essentially form or sculpt them one at a time using the sewing machine and our hands,” Johnston says. This one-by-one process is very much responsible for the baskets’ organic feel and individuality.

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    Katharina Horstmann

    A former interior designer for architect Piero Lissoni and consultant for the Angelo Mangiarotti Foundation, Katharina is a Berlin-based journalist who writes about architecture, design, and culture for the likes of the Goethe Institut and Baumeister.