Weaving together a flood of stories

When the Oxfordshire Basketmakers invited its 100-strong membership to take up the challenge of creating a two-dimensional piece of basketry, 18 did. Their brief was to capture the spirit of rivers, their makeup and their environs. It is these pieces that comprise this exhibition.

Joanna Gilmour and Lorraine Gilmore have curated the exhibition superbly. Each piece is displayed in a matching formal black frame and held slightly proud of its mount, allowing the opportunity for the shadows cast by each to play their part. This has created both a coherent identity for the exhibition as a whole and the opportunity to explore each piece in detail, the range and sophistication of the techniques and the materials used, both of which take this artform beyond the confines of traditional basket making. Joanna Gilmour is showing her Barque Regatta, where four jaunty boats plough their way across the piece, the strength of wind and wave positively palpable, accentuated by elongated masts topped with streaming flags, each comprised of a delicately folded piece of bamboo.

Co-curator Lorraine Gilmore is showing And out again I curve, using fishing line in the most beautiful self-referential way, where start and finish give way to the most fluid of movements as the combined lines of the threads describe whirls and eddies of silvers, blues and greys. The piece and its title are taken from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem The Brook.

Janet Cross has given her Flood lines a textile feel by her extraordinary use of porcelain and oxide. She has woven the thinnest strands of porcelain into a formal chequered pattern, the firing of which she describes as a real challenge! She took her inspiration from images of flood water on Port Meadow. The formal rectangular shape of the pieces is disrupted by its ragged edges, as if the flood water was trying to creep still further into a wider environment.

In River Lines, Judith Fern has also created a formal rectangular piece made from plaited paper: paper inscribed with both poetry and with drawn lines that represent the Thames from source to sea. She has created an integrated portrait of the river, where one part cannot be isolated from another and each measure of water provides energy to and a context for the others.

Sail away: Joanna Gilmour's Barque Regatta

Linda Mowat worked in the surprising medium, photographs, to create Windrush. She has woven 12 identical portraits of the Windrush, in full flood earlier this year, into a simple semi-star shape in which a central vortex of insistent whites and blues reminds of the power, colour and movement of water and which she surrounds with a repetitive dark patterns of banks, trees and foliage that all eventually surrender to the power of the watery centre.

Ruth Salter’s Ripple I used willow and white poplar, from local hedgerows, to create a circular woven base in browns, tans and blacks. It has been created in the same way as a traditional basket base, but stopped short there, providing a 2D not 3D piece. The texture and shape of each twig and whip reference the outward movement of a ripple, culminating in a starburst comprised of the delicate tips of each whip, enhanced by the buds it carries, some tight-closed others open and celebratory as in the case of the pussy willow.

Fish Square is the witty creation of Bob Summers. Working in willow Summers has enjoined four fish, making reference to their shoaling habits and to a later state for some of them: packed head to tail ready for market.

Scale: Fish Square by Bob Summers

The Basketmakers made a deliberate decision to hold an open submission exhibition, as this is in line with their philosophy: their membership embraces professional makers and teachers as well as people who want to ‘have a go’. In this spirit there are two basketry workshops in conjunction with the exhibition. Fish and Eels, on July 30, for 7-11-year-olds and Experimenting with Willow on August 2 for adults. From each, course participants will take home something they have made.

The exhibition is in The Wall, a slender gallery that takes up a small part of the large and diverse Museum of River and Rowing in Henley. The space, The Wall, and the scale of the show celebrate the stunning intricacy and complexity of 2D basketry, the talent of basketmakers and the interpretations they have brought to rivers and water and the plants, fish, boats and people that flourish thanks to them.

Daily until August 26