A new twist on willow

To preserve the pliability of her precious bundles of willow, Lise Bech's workshop in rural Ayrshire is rarely heated. Inside the former dairy adjoining the remote 18th-century stone croft where she lives with her husband Narada, the air can feel decidedly raw at the start of a chilly winter day. But the strength and skill she uses to weave each one of her wonderful creations - feathery wreaths, Celtic-knot platters, large cauldron-like baskets edged with grasses and sculptural vessels - soon generates enough heat to warm the room. Sitting astride a simple wooden plank, she dexterously works the individual rods almost as though they were elastic, twisting, turning and threading them at amazing speed. She has a world of experience and knowledge at her fingertips: "I've been making baskets for 25 years, but the sense of excitement in creating a structure from nothing but a bundle of sticks is always there."

Yet her first encounters with basketmaking, while training as an occupational therapist after moving to England from her native Denmark, were far from promising. "I had to make cane structures with the patients but it didn't do anything for me at all," she remembers. A decade later, however, while working on a community project for the Quakers in Northern Ireland, she discovered how working with willow could give the craft a whole new dimension. "I did a course there with Alison Fitzgerald, who also grew her own crop. I loved the process of weaving with it and was really drawn towards the idea of a material I could grow and harvest myself. I very much wanted to be part of the whole cycle of making something." And when Lise moved to Scotland in the mid-1980s, determined to pursue her new-found hobby while living as self-sufficiently and sustainably as possible, Alison gave her 100 willow cuttings to plant on the bare acre of land that surrounded the then-rundown cottage.

"I created a willow bed in our first year here and began harvesting ten months later. From that point, willow has really ruled my life," Lise says. Today, she has about 800 plants interspersed around the woodland she and Narada have created to provide shelter and interest. "We work the land veganically using only green manures and our own compost, not fish or animal products. We garden with what nature has to offer. The willow comes into bud in April, reaching six foot tall in October. Harvesting takes place in winter when the plants are dormant, with Lise coppicing the slender stems by hand to allow new shoots to grow. She now has 22 different varieties providing her with a wide palette of colours for her weaving - from silvery greys, vivid greens and oranges to deep blues, purples and an intense black. "I usually work with unstripped willow to allow the hues and changing tones of the bark to form an intrinsic element of the finished product," she explains. "Colours vary from year to year according to the soil and the weather, and changes within a single rod, too - it can be light at the tip and much darker at the butt. So every basket is a one-off - they're not manufactured to uniform standards."

The undulating, open land that surrounds her home at the head of the River Ayr also provides other traditional materials that Lise incorporates into her work. Fieldrushes, heather, hairmoss, dogwood, broom and birch are gathered from the fields and woven between the willow to introduce extra colour, texture and interest: "It's very important to me to use materials from the local landscape. For me, basketmaking is a way of bringing nature into people's homes."

Today, many of her pieces display experimental and decorative techniques that blur the boundaries between art and craft, but in the early days she was simply driven by a desire to master the basics: "At that time the only books available were about weaving with cane not willow. All I had was one leaflet about how to make a log basket and, using a great deal of trial and error, I tried to adapt this method to different designs. I knew that I needed more tuition if I was going to succeed but willow basketmaking had virtually died out in Scotland." So she made contact with an English basketmaker, Colin Manthorpe, who had learnt his trade as an apprentice in the 1950s, and arranged for him to come to Scotland and teach courses for herself and a few others. "He showed us all the traditional skills and then I spent hours practising - eventually my round baskets were round and my square ones square."

Wanting to encourage others to discover the joys of willow weaving and fearing that basketmaking in Scotland faced complete extinction, Lise became an early member of the Scottish Basketmakers' Circle (SBC). To spread the word, she has travelled all over Scotland, teaching courses and taking willow cuttings wherever she went to encourage others to grow their own. It is a testament to her pioneering and nurturing spirit that today the SBC has 200 members with 25 making a living from the craft.

Lise's passionate interest in basketmaking has inspired her to explore the history of this ancient practice, thought to be older than potting. On Shetland, for example, she worked with the last true maker of the ‘kishie', a pannier made of woven local oat straw used to carry peat, potatoes and bricks. She has also recreated eel traps from 2,500 BC for Channel 4's Time Team and made replica Stone Age baskets for Kilmartin House Museum. But her creativity and talent have also helped move the craft firmly into the future by giving it greater contemporary appeal. "I wanted to be less bound by the rules and the idea of making symmetrical shapes and straight lines," Lise explains. "I wanted to let the willow speak for itself and make even more of its pliability." In 2004, she began work on a series of strikingly innovative designs - tall woven ‘vases' and shorter, squatter ‘pods' with flowing, curved shapes, incorporating unusual curves and dents inspired by the contours of the Ayrshire countryside. Achieving the sculptural shapes with their narrow apertures and sense of movement requires great dexterity as the stakes have to come very close together and working the weavers in between becomes more like embroidery than weaving.

Over the years Lise has managed to merge the roles of grower, designer, maker, marketer and teacher into one, with her work selling at prestigious fairs and galleries across the country, but she's never happier than when she's weaving in the workshop. Here, baskets of all shapes hang from the rafters and her distinctive, swirling wreaths adorn the walls. Collections of trusted tools - bodkins, secateurs, snippers, cleavers and mallets - sit alongside the more makeshift - clothes pegs, electrical wire and shoelaces to hold the willow in place, and stones and pebbles from her travels to weight down work in progress. Nothing is wasted - small coloured offcuts are made into earrings, necklaces and bracelets, or twisted into faggots for the fire. Bundles of her home-grown willow, stored in the rafters to dry, scent the air with an incense-like aroma. "I may be feeling worried or tense but the rhythm of the weaving has a meditative effect that relaxes me," Lise says. "It allows me to express myself but it's more than my work and my hobby - it's a compulsion. And what other artwork smells so good?"