Basketry Elevated to Art

SEELEY LAKE - A basket weaver uses natural or man-made fibers to create a container that can be used for some practical purpose. A fiber artist might make a basket but the item's practical purpose is secondary to its value as a work of art. With fiber art, the focus is on the beauty of the materials, admiration for the skill of the weaver and appreciation for the amount of time and patience required to bring the piece to completion. Seeley Lake resident Patti Chamberlin is a fiber artist.

Thirty years ago Chamberlin and a friend took a basket weaving class just for the fun of it. Chamberlin said she immediately fell in love with the craft. She spent a couple of years learning and practicing the techniques but then found herself bored with traditional basketry and anxious to do something more creative, something more expressive of her own individuality. She calls her art Contemporary Basketry.

Explaining her process, Chamberlin said, "The way I start out with my weaving, I'll often go to the internet just to get some ideas. I'll look at shapes, forms, other designs. But once I'm working on the piece, my hands are doing more of the talking than my brain. I'll put it down and pick it up later and it doesn't look anything close to the inspiration picture. But it gets me started. Most all the weavers I've talked to kind of do the same thing. They have an idea in mind and their hands are the thing that kind of guides it."

Though Chamberlin considers pine needles, especially the long needles of the Torrey pine tree, "her passion," she also uses reed, willow, palm inflorescence and other natural fibers. She continues to experiment with different materials and currently is drying some bear grass stalks to work with. Chamberlin often incorporates beads, fused glass, tree branches, antlers and other found or purchased objects into her work. Most recently, she collected goat fur and is eager to experiment with it.

"Adding more materials is my fun part," Chamberlin said. "I keep trying to get out of my box. That's why I love doing things that are extremely challenging for me."

Among the things Chamberlin called challenging are sewing and beadwork. She said, "I hate sewing. I can't even sew a hem." Yet her fiber art pieces require considerably more skillful sewing than does a hem.

"Little tiny beads are difficult to work with," she said. "I've got a piece that I've been working on for about 10 years now. It's a lamp. But the beads are really tiny so I have to take the needle off, put the bead through the thread and then rethread the needle – for every single stitch."

While acknowledging her projects require a large amount of patience, Chamberlin said she finds the work therapeutic rather than tedious.

"My husband passed away 12 years ago," she said. "And it [creative basketry] was the best therapy I could have had. When I'm working I just get off into another little world and I just concentrate on what I'm doing."

Chamberlin calls herself a "snowbird." For 27 years she has spent her summers at her Montana home on Big Sky Lake and her winters in southern California where she belongs to a fiber art guild. She also does a lot of traveling to other countries, often with fellow fiber artists. She has taken weaving classes in places such as France and Denmark and collects baskets from all the countries she visits.

Chamberlin estimates she has crafted at least 300 art pieces. Although she displays her work on her website at pattichamberlin.com and through consignment stores such as the Grizzly Claw Trading Company in Seeley Lake, she said most of her sales come by word of mouth.