The Fibers of Our Lives

Saying that Lissa Hunter makes baskets is a bit like saying that Picasso doodled. She does. He did. But in both cases the work transcends those simple categories. Hunter's baskets are about life, loss, love and death. While she has made baskets that function in the sense that you could, say, put a bouquet of dried flowers in them, they're not really meant for carrying anything other than the multiple meanings of human existence.

In Hunter's studio in an old brick building in Portland, Maine, drawers and shelves are filled with buttons, shells, stones, feathers and beads, all key ingredients in her early work. However, she says, “I rarely use them anymore. Something happened in the work, a shift.”

The “something” was the 1991 loss of her father, just as she was preparing for a show at the Gallery on the Green in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her baskets, always exquisite and meticulously constructed, “used to be more decorative,” she explains. “They were well-made, but didn't have much to say beyond that.”

During her father's long illness, though, and after his death, they took on a new solemnity and simplicity. Since then, her coiled baskets have mostly been made of raffia or waxed linen thread, with less emphasis on the adornments of the past.

She works with themes. Before the 1991 show, she says, “I was thinking about power. I asked people about their definition of power.” The responses ranged from storms to sex. “A nine-year-old girl said being a princess would be power,” Hunter says. “Then, when my father was so sick, I thought about powerlessness.” One work from that era, Hostages, is a series of little raffia baskets in irregular cone shapes, each bound with spruce roots. They have an anthropomorphic feel, slumping toward each other. They resemble, albeit in miniature, Rodin's great Burghers of Calais, noble prisoners on their way to their death.

Some of Hunter's work is two-dimensional collage. A Cold Wind Blows, made of paper, metal, paint, oil stick, thread and pencil, was given a second name, the Ascension, by her dealers. It looks like an abstracted gown with a billowing blue train, rising toward heaven. To Hunter, it might also represent the ascension of her father. While her work comes out of the events of her life, that life hasn't been one of the clichéd struggling artist. “I ought to have had a tortured childhood in extreme poverty,” she says. “But I didn't.”

In the opulently illustrated 2006 book Lissa Hunter: Histories Real and Imagined, author Abby Johnston calls Hunter's upbringing “white bread.” Hunter, born in Indianapolis in 1945, agrees—literally. In her corner of the Midwest at the time, she says, “Having whole wheat bread would have been considered suspect.” Her father was a salesman; her mother sewed and braided rugs. “She was always making things,” Hunter recalls. “That's a huge part of who I am.”

After leaving a teaching job at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, she relocated in 1979 to Maine, where she found a supportive community of artists and a burgeoning art scene, thanks to a growing number of galleries, the Portland Museum of Art and the Maine College of Art. While she still leads workshops, since moving to Maine she's managed, sometimes just barely, to earn a living through her art rather than through full-time teaching. She exhibits frequently, all around the country, and her works are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Her 2004 Evolution/Extinction is based on Darwin's warning that as a species becomes rarer, it is in danger of disappearing altogether. Hunter expresses this idea through a horizontal parade of little baskets on a shelf-like pedestal. They start out small at the left, grow into robustness, then dwindle. Finally, at the right, the shelf is unoccupied. The message could hardly be expressed more effectively by a painter or sculptor.

Many of her small baskets occupy niches in boxes she's had made to hold them. They look like precious objects placed in time capsules, ready for rediscovery in future centuries. Many of the works are also covered with calligraphic scribbling that resembles the scribbles of the painter Cy Twombly. “It's faux writing,” she explains. “People are always trying to decipher it, especially men. One guy thought he made out the words ‘Mozart' and ‘salmon.' ” Mozart fishing in the Danube, perhaps?

Hunter doesn't take herself too seriously. Some of her works include a few smooth gray-blue beach stones. “I collect them by the shore,” she says airily. “Wearing a white gown. At daybreak.”

Then, erupting with laughter, she announces, “I buy them at a stone supplier who usually sells by the ton.”

EDITOR'S NOTE  Lissa Hunter is represented by the Jane Sauer Thirteen Moons Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, (505) 995-8513. Hunter's works range in price from $2,500 to $14,000.