John McQueen (1943, USA) 

Manitou
ca 1988
Plated spruce bark, red osier, string; ht. 18, lg. 72, wd. 40 in.

John McQueen shares status with the other three weavers and/or basketmakers in this auction; he is a radical game changer. Each of these artists have taken the fiber-basket world in surprising directions that are more compatible in many ways with the fine arts and than with crafts, the well from which all four have sprung. McQueen works mainly with twigs, bark, waxed string and incongruously plastic twist ties. Early work was more or less focused on the basket, man's first domestic vessels. But they were never functional, more sculpture about baskets than the real thing. Over time McQueen's repertoire of forms have taken on language and the figure. At times the "meaning" is purely the emotional response one feels to an abstract form. At other times his works are wry commentary on ecology, politics and that wondrous comedy, the human condition. McQueen says about his work: "The baskets I make are branches of trees rearranged and are no longer real the way a tree is real." This may also be a standing figure, a birdhouse or a fifty foot hedgerow. In this work the meaning and from are deliberately obscure. The bark form rests on a grid of twigs, suggesting the human torso, a cave or a bladder.

References: Halper, Vicki and Rossbach, Ed. John McQueen: The Language of Containment. Washington (DC): Renwick Gallery, 1992.

Pulleyn, Rob. The Basketmaker's Art. Asheville (NC): Lark Books, 1992.

Excellent original condition.