This practice-led research explores how basket weaving serves as a mode of making that visualizes the impermanence of my nomadic experience and expresses the notion of ‘home’. Through an iterative process of foraging, collecting, and weaving with natural materials, I investigate how the act of making can embody themes of impermanence, memory, and belonging. The research draws upon personal narratives of displacement, where frequent relocation shaped an enduring search for home, one that is both transient and deeply rooted in lived experience.
Basketry, as both a physical and conceptual framework, becomes a vessel for exploring the dualities of home—presence and absence, containment and openness, rootedness and movement. By engaging with organic materials such as seed pods, bark, and plant fibres, I navigate the temporality of materials, allowing decay, transformation, and renewal to inform my making process. The fragility of natural matter mirrors the ephemeral nature of home, where memories and landscapes overlap, dissolve, and re-emerge. This research examines how the techniques of coiling, twining, and binding can translate affective experiences of detachment, serenity, and spiritual connection into tactile forms.
The theoretical framework integrates perspectives from Taoism, Wabi-Sabi aesthetics, and Eastern philosophies of impermanence, positioning weaving as a contemplative practice that aligns with the rhythms of nature. Just as a bird instinctively gathers and weaves its nest, my process of making becomes an act of constructing belonging—one that does not seek permanence but rather embraces fluidity. Through tactile engagement with materials, weaving serves as a meditative inquiry into home as an ever-evolving, ephemeral space.
This project contributes to contemporary discourse on materiality, affect, and craft by demonstrating how basketry can function as both a personal and philosophical meditation on home. It reinterprets basket weaving not merely as an artisanal technique but as a dynamic process of meaning-making, where material, memory, and movement coalesce. This research reveals how the impermanence of home can be held within the woven structure of a basket, allowing for both containment and transformation.
