by Ruby Taylor | Jun 16, 2021 | All Journal Entries, Wild Basketry, Wild Pottery
I talk with the founder of Plants & Colour, Flora Arbuthnott, about how I approach working with wild gathered materials in my creative practice. Intimacy with the landscape, the living world, plants, earth, other creatures, has always been meaningful to me as a...
by Ruby Taylor | Mar 12, 2021 | All Journal Entries, Wild Basketry, Wild Pottery
I talk with Kim Winter, editor at the Basketmakers Association, about my practice. KW: How did you get into making baskets with foraged materials? The training I had at degree level (3D Craft, Brighton Uni) was formative, being materials led. I remember in the first...
by Ruby Taylor | Aug 26, 2020 | All Journal Entries, Foraging, Wakehurst 2017
Site specific sculpture commissioned by Wakehurst in 2017 as part of the Wild Wood Festival. Situated in Pearcelands Wood, their newly-opened ancient woodland. The horizontal oak branch (from which hazel poles are suspended) fell in the great storm of 1987. The branch...
by Ruby Taylor | May 2, 2020 | All Journal Entries, Courses, Foraging, Wild Pottery
Ankle-deep and barefoot in the cold stream (or thigh-deep as we were one April after a long rainy period), grubbing away at an exposed seam of clay. It’s just like being a child again, squidging clay between our fingers, stirring memories of making mud pies,...
by Ruby Taylor | Jul 9, 2019 | All Journal Entries, Foraging, Wild Basketry
‘Plants are integral to reweaving the connection between land and people. A place becomes a home when it sustains you, when it feeds you in body as well as spirit.’ (Robin Wall Kimmerer) There’s an arable field margin under two ancient oaks that is species-rich with...
by Ruby Taylor | Jun 12, 2019 | All Journal Entries, Wild Basketry
One of the first things you notice about Owen Jones, apart from his friendly, relaxed demeanor, is his hands: huge and work-worn. They’ve definitely seen some years of graft. I’m at his workshop in Cumbria, to make an oak swill. This is a traditional split...