Tracey Clement’s hands holding her A Year of Time – 827:24810 basket by Bridget Kennedy, photo Bridget Kennedy.
I’ve always liked the phrase ‘going to hell in a handbasket’ without, until now, giving its subtleties much thought.
I mean, what is a handbasket? Google’s online dictionary offers “a small basket carried in the hand,” a neat piece of tautology. Regardless of how you define one, handbaskets are certainly not a common accessory these days. The use of this archaic bit of kit points to the distant origins of this aphorism, which, depending on who you ask and which version you cite, can be dated to the early seventeenth century.
Going to hell in a handbasket seems to be a catchier, Americanised version of going to hell in a handcart or wheelbarrow. Leaving aside any religious implications, what I like about this image (in both versions) is the sheer labour involved; the determination, the monumental effort needed to reach an undesirable destination. Surely there are easier ways of getting somewhere you don’t want to go than pushing a handcart or lugging a basket down the no doubt long and winding, rutted and boggy highway to hell. Even more importantly, this phrase points to our complicity in our own damnation, for it seems to me that we are not being schlepped to hell the hard way in a basket carried by someone else: the burden we must bear is ourselves. And it is the language of craft and its inherent agency that reinforces this interpretation.
Craft requires tenacity, persistence, hard work and dexterity. The handbasket is not only carried by hand, it is more than likely made by hand; carefully, wilfully and skilfully crafted by an individual who is shaping their own destiny. We aren’t carried to hell as a result of the actions of someone else; we get there all on our own in a metaphorical basket of our own making. So to say that Sydney is going to hell in a handbasket is to highlight the fact that we, its citizens (and many who are not) are complicit in both crafting and destroying this city.
Let’s consider Sydney itself as a handmade object –one made collaboratively, over time– in order to unravel the story it tells about the forces that shape it. And finding that the city is going somewhere unpleasant in the proverbial woven vessel, I will also analyse an actual basket, handmade from textiles by jeweller Bridget Kennedy – a tactile basket nestled within a metaphorical one, a small object shaped by living within a much larger one– to discover an alternative story of resistance and hope.
Part one: Handmade city
Block of flats behind Parramatta Road, Annandale, photo: Tracey Clement
For a brief moment, I picture the handmade object that is Sydney at a more conventional handmade scale: small enough to hold gently in both my hands so that I can see everything at once and examine the city as a whole. I imagine it encased in a glass dome, but instead of flurries of artificial snow or bright glitter skittering across the skyline I witness the increasingly wild weather that characterises our post climate change age. There are days of torrential rain, violent storms punctuated by lighting and gigantic hailstones: trees fall, gutters overflow, homes flood. Then day after day, week after week, of drought: the humidity is so intense, the sun so relentless, that the city seems to be almost imperceptibly crushed, despite the dome that encloses it in my protective hands.
But this is a fancy, and at first, asserting that Sydney is a handmade object does seem fanciful, if not preposterous. It’s too big, too heterogeneous and too mechanised. But really, thinking about it, what else could it be? Cities don’t spring forth from the earth fully formed; they are built, by people, by hand, over time. Like most handcrafted objects (with very few exceptions) they are built with the aid of tools, both simple and sophisticated. Despite its complexity and vast scale, Sydney is a humanmade, handmade object, shaped –in ways both large and small– by all of us who live here. And by many (investors, corporate CEOs, politicians) who don’t.
As an artist, I’ve been using labour-intensive techniques to explore the conceptual resonance of artworks in the form of model cities. In my recent work, Soft Science City, 2018, I sought to highlight the role we all play in making the world around us. Through this sculpture, an abstract mini-metropolis made from equal parts laboratory glass and knitted yarn, I hoped to draw attention to the fact that all of our activities shape the world we live in –and for most of us that is an urban world, the world of the city.
The world is made, not just by the discoveries of science, but also through small everyday domestic activities. My Soft Science City attempts to make manifest the feminist tenet that the personal is political; all of our actions, both good and bad, have consequences. Sydney – like my miniature city, like all cities – is a humanmade, handmade object. Sydney is a palimpsest; a layered, collaboratively constructed artefact which we all have a hand in shaping, either through action or inaction.
But, while we all shape the city, it would be disingenuous not to acknowledge the imbalance in this power. For example, individual citizens can make their mark on the fabric of the metropolis by taking to the streets with spray cans and stencils or posters and buckets of wallpaper paste. While Sydney City Council can decide to spend millions on a sculpture in the form of a giant milk crate. A private homeowner can tear down their old house and replace it with a new McMansion made from the cheapest materials money can buy, while a developer can level three city blocks and throw up a whole poorly constructed vertical village.
Individuals, government entities and corporations are all “making” the city, in collaboration if not with cooperation. But the scale of their impact varies wildly. And this inequality is also part of the Sydney story. For every object has a story to tell, or more accurately an infinite number of stories; a quantity limited only by the willingness of observers to take the time to decrypt the narratives embedded in its materiality, form and cultural context.
If we read Sydney as a collectively constructed handmade object what does it tell us? What values does it currently represent? What do the changes to the built environment tell us about the forces that shape this city?
Sydney: Pretty as a Postcard
Sydney is a pretty city, all sandy beaches, shady coves and architectural masterpieces. Or at least it is in the picture postcard versions: a slim slice of the city caught between The Bridge and The Opera House with the deep water harbour gleaming in between, or a stretch of Bondi beach. And it’s true, Sydney has a lot of lovely water: fresh and salty sources of food and a logistical network for the Aboriginal people who made their home here millennia before Cook and his cronies showed up. These arrivistes also saw the harbour and its tributaries as part of a communications and transport system, and the first Government House was built just steps from what is now Circular Quay, with a magnificent view of Sydney Cove. But if you visit the site today and look towards the harbour all you can see is yet another skyscraper under renovation. Sydney may have once been defined by its watery heart – but no longer.
Local Knowledge
The city is a palimpsest, Parramatta Road, Leichhardt, photo: Tracey Clement
I live on Parramatta Road, an unloved and unlovely major artery heading west out of Sydney towards (unsurprisingly) Parramatta. Our property, which we are lucky enough to own (or at least pay a mortgage on) is a wedge-shaped shop/flat sandwiched between what is reputedly a rather good Japanese restaurant and what appears to be a very cheap brothel. On our side you are in Annandale, cross the road and it’s Stanmore. Head east for Camperdown and west to Leichhardt and Petersham.
We’ve made our own small changes to the city’s streetscape (by hand) by removing the redundant signage from the previous business, painting the lower façade a weird aubergine colour that was meant to be a very dark grey (thanks to the notoriously bad paint mixing at Bunnings) and by putting a large artwork in our plate glass window. But elsewhere in the neighbourhood the city is being re-made on a much larger scale, driven by both property speculation and transportation logistics.
While our bit of Parramatta Road is a sun-blasted, treeless, busy four-lane highway (all of which helps to slow the process of gentrification), leafy suburbs lie immediately behind where the median house price is closer to $1.5 million than anything else (despite a recent drop in property values reported with some hysteria). And here homeowners are capitalising on what they’ve got by levelling cute wooden worker’s cottages and stately Victorian terraces (both built to last in the nineteenth century) and replacing them with giant McMansions, or, more commonly, with two houses where there once was one; none of which look like they’ll last to the end of this century, let alone into another.
Block of flats behind Parramatta Road, Annandale, photo: Tracey Clement
Back on Parramatta Road developers are making bigger changes (still made by hand, by people and their tools) by erecting stacks of box-like apartments. And while none of these are as high or wide as the massive multi-storied multi-tower developments springing up in nearby Alexandria, Zetland, Mascot or Green Square (and the rest…), they do share an apparent disregard for the realities of the post-climate change world we live in. As I sit writing this in the midst of yet another record-breaking summer heatwave, I can’t help but wonder: do these buildings have solar panels, rainwater collection, grey water recycling, any passive cooling capabilities?
And while I didn’t observe all of them being built, I can attest to the fact that the ones I did watch go up (very swiftly indeed) did not re-use or salvage any of the materials (bricks, lovely old floorboards, hardwood beams, windows, etc) from the demolished structures. Sustainability does not seem to have been a concern in their construction, on any level. Neither in fact, does quality: not quality of materials, or craftsmanship, or indeed quality of life for the people who will live within low ceilinged spaces that require non-stop air conditioning to get any airflow as they don’t have enough windows to get even a small cross-breeze going.
And all these changes to the built fabric of the city, both large and small, are telling the same story: Sydney is being radically re-shaped by the following values: new is better than old, big is better than small (or more is better than less), money is more important than people (or beauty, or anything else), and now is more important than the future.
Construction on Parramatta Road, Leichhardt, photo T. Clement, photo: Tracey Clement
This last sums up what is really sending Sydney to hell in a handbasket. And our fixation on the present, with no real thought for future implications, can be seen clearly in the way transport logistics are being dealt with, particularly in Westconnex a series of tolled tunnels and motorways in which private corporations own a controlling percentage, despite being funded by $16.8 billion taxpayer dollars. This transportation infrastructure project is having a major impact on the handmade object that is Sydney, but it is less a plan for the future and more a retro throwback to the past.
Westconnex is an old, outdated idea. It echoes American designer Norman Bel Geddes’s 1939 vision, Futurama, a massive scale model of cities linked by what he liked to call “magic motorways.” This impressive piece of propaganda was funded by the car manufacturing industry and it was so successful that it helped to create the car-centric, fossil fuel burning, transportation nightmare we are currently in. Yet while other cities around the world ban or restrict cars in the inner city (Madrid, Oslo, Brussels) and make public transport free (Luxembourg, even Melbourne to a limited extent), Sydney is demolishing beautiful old federation houses and levelling whole city blocks to plough through toll roads.
Westconnex will burrow through my neighbourhood wreaking havoc and damaging homes, as it already has elsewhere. Nearby a whole city block has been levelled, cordoned off with imposing black hoardings to keep out prying eyes. My house may or may not be threatened by vibration, or 24 hour noise, or toxic emissions: it’s too soon to tell. But someone’s will. However, the real catastrophe isn’t that people have been forced to move, or that homes have been damaged (even though these are upsetting incidents), the real disaster is that this so called solution is really just exacerbating the problem: traffic is like a goldfish, it just keeps growing to fill the allocated space.
Of course, Sydney is investing in public transport infrastructure too, but sadly not free and not enough. And the construction of the light rail network has again highlighted a lack of forward-facing vision as some of Sydney’s oldest living citizens were slaughtered in its wake. There were others too, but in 2016 the centenarian trees along ANZAC Parade made headlines: there were vigils, there were protests, but men with chainsaws chopped them down (by hand) nonetheless, irrevocably changing the shape of the city. Once again the old made way for the new, without any thought for the future.
Naturally, the official response was to pledge to plant more trees. And as activist and essayist Rebecca Solnit rightly points out in her love letter to San Francisco, Infinite City, planting a tree is a gesture of commitment, of hope for the future. But somehow this did not feel like a vison of hope. As temperatures rise and rise we need more big old trees not just saplings that will take generations to grow. We need them for shade, for oxygen generation, for carbon sequestering, for animal habitat, and for the wisdom they could share–if only we would listen.
That reading Sydney as a handmade object reveals that it is being shaped by the notions that too much is never enough and that corporate profit is more important than, well… just about everything shouldn’t really come as much of a surprise. After all, these values are the underlying principles of neoliberalism and late capitalism, the interlinked forces that have led us to conceive of our entire planet (and all of its inhabitants: animal, mineral and vegetable) as commodities ripe for exploitation, thus re-shaping it to breaking point.
It’s a grim picture to be sure and the neoliberal capitalist juggernaut is a tough one to resist as it inexorably drags us to hell in a handbasket we are all complicit in making. Yet every day I do catch glimmers of hope: some in the steady wisdom of trees, and some in the tenacious resistance of craft.
Part Two: Crafting change
Tree seedling, Stanmore, photo: Tracey Clement
Trees are among the oldest living organisms on earth. Some species can live almost indefinitely –if conditions are right and if nobody decides that they are in the way. There is an ancient Huon pine in Tasmania that is either 2000 or 11,000 years-old, depending on how you date it. Elsewhere, numerous old trees have been found that have lived more than 3,500 years. Recently, on Norfolk Island, I was lucky enough to spend time with fig trees that have been around at least 150 years. Even these relative youngsters are old enough to tell our short lived race a thing or two, if only we cared to listen.
Of course, trees don’t actually speak, or at least not to us. But it’s easy enough to read their words of wisdom. Every day as I walk through my neighbourhood I see trees taking hold where they haven’t been invited: in cracks in the pavement, in chinks between bricks, in vacant lots, on the council’s verges and in people’s gardens. Some are tiny saplings and others are already too big to be easily dismissed, but they are all saying the same things. In addition to extolling the virtues of slowing down, shutting up and exercising patience, they are saying never give up, don’t ask for permission: resist, adapt and survive.
In the human world, craft –and not just overt acts of craftivism– offers pointers on how to subvert the more-more-more/new-new-new imperatives that are shaping Sydney. In fact, in a contemporary society predicated on a culture of consumption and disposability, all good craft is an act of resistance.
At its best, craft values quality over quantity and things are made to last. Craft embodies respect; respect for both the inherent qualities of materials and for the skill, time and dedication of the person using them. The making of a well-made, handmade object is an act of hope and a gesture of defiance: a physical manifestation of values that challenge the dominant paradigm of neoliberal late capitalism.
Of all the crafts, basketry is probably most maligned in popular culture (followed by knitting as a close second). Since the early twentieth century, when it became a key strategy in the then burgeoning field of occupational therapy, the reputation of basket weaving as an activity favoured only by the feeble minded, shell shocked or otherwise incapacitated – those unable to undertake more useful activities – has become thoroughly entrenched. Witness Liberal Party Education Minister Simon Birmingham’s now infamous denigration of the technique in a May 2018 interview. In an article written in the wake of his insult, journalist and textile artist Sue Green wondered ‘Why are ‘feminine’ crafts like basket weaving disparaged by politicians?’ Her question contains part of the answer: these men see basket weaving as a soft option for those soft in the head, women included. But of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Basket weaving is hard work. It requires strong hands, dexterity, patience, tenacity, planning, and a highly developed sense of spatial awareness. And in baskets we can also find some of the clearest examples of craft as a manifestation of resistance, adaptation and survival.
Trees may be Sydney’s oldest living citizens, but its oldest living culture, that of the Aboriginal people, stretches back many, many millennia. At the Museum of Sydney, which is situated on Gadigal land, the fact that the Sydney region was already occupied by around 30 distinct clans when the colonial forces arrived is represented (at least in part) by a djuguma, a woman’s string bag made from bark fibre – a handbasket– made by Dharawal woman Phyllis Stewart in 2009. This basket is also a symbol of resilience and defiance. Practising her craft in the twenty-first century, Stewart is evidence of survival against terrible odds. Her use and adaptation of the skills of her ancestors is an act of resistance against the dominant cultural paradigm.
This piece is held in a museum, out of reach. But I am lucky enough to live with a hand crafted handbasket that reminds me daily that resistance is possible, a small vessel made by Sydney-based contemporary jeweller Bridget Kennedy.
Handbasket 827:24810
Holding A Year of Time – 827:24810 basket by Bridget Kennedy, photo: Tracey Clement
Titled 827:24810, my small Bridget Kennedy basket is made from hemp string, stitched together with linen thread in coral, pink, and cream. It is impressively precise without being crushed by the stultifying burden of perfection. In other words, it is clearly handmade; shaped by the rhythms of its maker’s movements.
As an ex-jeweller myself (or maybe I should say as a jeweller not currently practising, since the capacity for repetitive labour and the desire for precision and perfection may lie dormant, but they never truly leave) I know from experience that our own idiosyncrasies are always visible in whatever we make, no matter how hard we may try to disguise them, especially when trying to make something absolutely straight or perfectly symmetrical. Every handmade object is a record of the body that made it. Apart from the ambidextrous, we inevitably lean one way or the other and my Bridget Kennedy basket definitely lists to one side, it swells out in the middle of tapering in, and it undulates in slightly unpredictable ways. It reflects the motions of her hands as she stitched the basket together: the way her left hand held the needle, the way her right cradled and rotated the basket as it grew coil by coil over a period 13 hours and 47 minutes.
This little handbasket also has a subtle but distinct smell, which I suspect is from the hemp string, rather than the linen thread, as it reminds me of the very coarse old fashioned rope my father was partial to for all those odd jobs around the house which require rope: from making a swing in the backyard to tying furniture to the roof of the car.
As children, we hated this rope. Although it had been twined and twisted, it could never be entirely tamed; its prickly coils seemed to bite small soft hands and the strong musky smell it gave off when wet pointed to its wild side. We often wondered why we didn’t have nice tame nylon rope in pretty bright colours. But even then we could see that its very obstreperousness was what appealed to our father. He was an admirer of the natural world, and what he loved best was the difficult, the ugly, and the spiky. He liked cacti, vultures and hurty hemp rope – things that command respect, not because of their inherent beauty, but despite their lack of it.
Even on a miniature scale, as fine garden twine, the hemp string Kennedy has used retains some of these rebellious characteristics. Its stiff fibres refuse to be confined and several spring free from her carefully crafted coils. In this way, it gives me the same glimpse of hope that I catch when I spot a fugitive tree seedling taking root. It’s a reminder that nature can never truly be dominated. Given sufficient time, ecosystems will adapt, survive and thrive; although the loses may be legion.
In form, 827:24810 resembles a bud vase. But made from textiles, it is not designed to hold liquid. Its mouth is narrow, so whatever you put in you’d be hard pressed to get out again. In fact, standing just over 19cm tall and with an opening barely larger than a 20cent piece, this basket is too small to hold much at all. So does this mean it is lacking in utility? Not at all, for this small handbasket carries big ideas.
I own basket 827:24810, but I didn’t pay for it. Not with money, at least. My basket is one of 60 Kennedy made during the 2017 calendar year for A Year of Time, a project in which she offered to exchange each of her unique handmade baskets for an equal amount of time, or cash, or goods, or some combination of the above; all at the discretion of the recipient. In this way she highlighted the value we place on our own time, the value we place on the time of others, and the completely arbitrary nature of both time and money. Very big concepts indeed, all woven into one little basket.
I’ve written on these ideas elsewhere, in Making Time Manifest, the essay I exchanged for basket 827:24810, as well as on all those numbers I never quite got my head around (827 is the total minutes taken to manufacture it, 24810 is a 1:30 proportional figure – so every minute in a year becomes 30 minutes). Although I didn’t discuss it in my essay, I found it quite challenging confronting my own preconceived notions of value, of what my time was worth and how much of it I was willing to ‘spend.’ And this was precisely Kennedy’s point. But what strikes me most powerfully about her A Year of Time project now, after I have had the benefit of living with one of her handmade baskets, is that it physically embodies an act of resistance which undermines the dominant neoliberal late capitalist paradigm. As a symbol, it’s well worth the price (in time) I paid. In fact, it’s priceless.
Even though she, like most of us, lives in a city shaped by neoliberal late capitalist market forces, Kennedy’s A Year of Time baskets and lifestyle both remind us that we don’t always have to play by their rules. Kennedy runs a retail outlet where she sells jewels for money, but she also gives away fruit and veggies from her impressive permaculture garden and donates her labour twice a month at a local repair café where she helps others to fix things rather than throw them away. “Permaculture has, I guess, become my form of religion, if you can call it that,” she explains. “The three core tenets of permaculture are: care for earth, care for people, and fair share. The repair café reflects these values.” And these values are also threaded through the basket I exchanged my words for.
Made from salvaged materials she already had on hand, this basket reminds me every day that we don’t have to buy new, or buy more; we can re-use and re-purpose. And as evidence of a money-free transaction, it also highlights the fact that we don’t always have to buy at all; we can barter – our skills, our excess pumpkins, whatever. Most importantly, basket 827:24810, a finely crafted handmade object, gives me a much needed daily fix of hope, it reminds me that the dominant paradigm is not the only way to see the world. There are other ways. Resistance is possible.
The handbasket revolution
Sydney is a handmade object, and we who live here, and many (investors, politicians, corporations) who don’t, are all complicit in its perpetual changes; both good and bad. Currently, Sydney is being radically reshaped, driven by the market forces of neoliberalism and late capitalism. Sydney is going to hell in a handbasket. But in handbaskets, we can also find hope.
Both Phyllis Stewart and Bridget Kennedy’s baskets remind us that the dominant paradigm is not the only paradigm. Through their craft-based practices, these women show us the power of small acts of resistance, itty-bitty examples of defiance we can all access. Every time you re-use a glass jar instead of recycling it, every time you mend something instead of throwing it away and buying a new one, every time you make a swap or choose to purchase something handmade and well-made over something mass produced and shoddy; all of these small gestures subvert the rampant consumerism shaping our world.
Yes, these gestures are small, infinitesimally tiny in a big picture in which the entire planet is going to hell in a handbasket. And they may seem too small to make a difference. They are certainly not going to stop the juggernaut of Westconnex (or any motorway) ploughing through your neighbourhood, or stop the State government from selling off council housing to developers, or stop developers from building poorly made, ill-considered skyscrapers that crack. Even big gestures (massive protests, petitions with thousands of signatures, untold sad and angry face emojis on social media) have (so far) failed to stop the march of state-sanctioned neoliberal “progress” wreaking havoc through the fabric of Sydney. Only our politicians can do that.
But don’t forget, the personal is political: we can effect change, one teensy bit at a time. The small handmade handbaskets discussed above embody this truth. And a much larger metaphorical handbasket may point the way to a major cultural shift that could really shake things up.
In ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,’ an essay that is as funny as it is perceptive, the late-great science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-1989) asks us to reconsider the entire ‘story’ of human evolution and the markers of civilised ‘progress.’ Drawing on earlier work by Elizabeth Fisher, who pointed out that the basket probably pre-dates the spear as an invention, she suggests that instead of perpetuating the heroic tale that man evolved because of his prowess in killing, conflict and conquest, we should place more value on collecting, nurturing and sharing. As Le Guin put it, “So long as culture was explained as originating from and elaborating upon the use of long, hard objects for sticking, bashing, and killing, I never thought that I had or wanted, any particular share in it.” (151) Instead of heroes she advocates receptacles: bottles, net bags, coolamons. Handbaskets.
As an author and a thinker, Le Guin was well aware of the power of narrative, the importance of words. “It is the story that makes the difference,” she wrote. “It is the story that hid my humanity from me, the story the mammoth hunters told about bashing, thrusting, raping, killing, about the Hero.”(152) It is more than mere semantics to picture culture as a handbasket or carrier bag rather than a saga staring conquering heroes. It’s a revolution.
For as Le Guin well knew, “it’s clear that the Hero does not look well in this bag. He needs a stage or a pedestal or a pinnacle. You put him in a bag and he looks like a rabbit, like a potato.”(153) In fact, what he looks like is The Guardian Australia’s satirical cartoon character Ian the climate denialist potato: retrograde and ridiculous. Le Guin was right, instead of going to hell, let’s put all the neoliberal power players, the corporate raiders and their politician lackeys – the faded/jaded heroes of the past – in the bag and get on with the handbasket revolution: shaping a more caring/sharing future one finely crafted object, one tiny gesture, one city at a time.
References
Albrecht, Donald, ed. Noman Bel Geddes Designs America. New York: Abrams, 2012.
Bel Geddes, Norman. Magic Motorways. New York: Random House, 1940.
Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 149-54. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996.
Solnit, Rebecca, ed. Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.
Walker, Nathaniel Robert. “American Crossroads: General Motors’ Midcentury Campaign to Promote Modernist Urban Design in Hometown U.S.A.” Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 23, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 89-115.
Author
Tracey Clement is a professional artist and arts writer who currently lives in Sydney, Australia. As an artist Clement is known for creating artworks that meticulously utilise labour intensive techniques for their conceptual resonance. Her current work explores the symbolic possibilities of the model city. Clement holds a PhD in Contemporary Art and a Master of Visual Arts from the University of Sydney. She also has a bachelor degree in Art History-Theory from UNSW. Her research has been presented at several international conferences, including the Science Fiction Research Association (USA) and the Society for Utopian Studies (UK). She won the 2018 Blake Prize Established Artist Residency and a solo show in 2020 at the Casula Powerhouse. In 2019 she will be the artist in residence at Fairfield City Museum and Gallery, as well as undertake an AGNSW residency at the Cité in Paris.
