Artwork Details
- Title
- Porkypine Basket
- Artist
- Date
- 1975
- Location
- Not on view
- Dimensions
- 7 7⁄8 x 8 1⁄2 in. (20.0 x 21.5 cm) diam.
- Credit Line
- Museum purchase
- Mediums
- Mediums Description
- woven black ash
- Classifications
- Object Number
- 1975.135A-B
Artwork Description
Edith Bondie is known for her “porkypine” baskets, a playful name that describes their prickly surfaces. This globular basket is woven from bands of folded black ash splints nicknamed “porcupine quills.” Rather than a vessel to be used in the traditional sense, the basket instead emulates the form of a sassy porcupine or a puffed blowfish.
This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World, 2022
Edith Bondie is known for her "porkypine" or blowfish baskets, which have bulging surfaces covered with small triangles of folded wood. She weaves entirely by hand, using thin fibers of black ash that have been peeled from larger strips. This basket is hardly useful for carrying or storing things, because the spiky texture discourages us from touching its surface. A normally utilitarian object becomes, in Bondie's hands, an animal sculpture, evoking the raised quills of a porcupine, the puffed scales of a blowfish, or the poisonous spines of a sea urchin.