MOVERS & SHAKERS
Meet the basketmaker Annemarie O’sullivan
As Annemarie O’sullivan stands outside her workshop, she eagerly eyes a large bolt of willow. ‘This material connects me with the earth,’ she enthuses of the 20 or so varieties of willow she grows on a half-acre allotment nearby. The bolt has been drying, tied top and bottom like bunches of asparagus, since being harvested in winter.
Annemarie is an Irish born, East Sussex-based basketmaker, and transforms home-grown willow and locally coppiced woods into curvaceous, capacious forms. Her studio is in a peaceful spot between the garden, greenhouse and 16th-century house she shares with husband Tom Mcwalter (who joined working with Annemarie full-time in 2017) and their two sons. It’s here that she crafts her magnificent baskets, elegant platters, bushy or woven pendant lights and sculptural installations, practising methods that have been passed down for centuries, even millennia. On a recent residency with The New Craftsmen on the Orkney Islands, she taught herself the region’s ancient techniques of working with heather and rye straw; she uses locally coppiced hazel for basket handles and steamed sweet chestnut for the hoops on her trays and for large-scale sculptures.
Arriving late to basketmaking, Annemarie worked as a teacher before becoming hooked after a one-day course in Brighton booked 16 years ago on a whim; the part-time basketry programme at the City Lit in London, where Annemarie trained once a week over five years, convinced her to jack in the day job. From the moment Annemarie started to weave, ‘there was an extraordinary feeling of familiarity, like I had been doing this forever,’ she remembers.
Today, her basket shapes are often inspired by those traditionally used for storing things like seed-lips, rhubarb, lobsters and oysters. Sought-after around the world, Annemarie’s baskets are hung above the bar at Kit Kemp’s The Whitby Hotel in New York; others are in private collections or exhibited with the likes of Hauser & Wirth’s Make gallery in Somerset. ‘I love to feel the connection to those people in the past who’ve made, worked and mended baskets with what I’m doing today.’
Annemarieosullivan.co.uk