Porkypine Basket

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.