Weaving a better life

Zodwa Maphumulo: BAT Shop, South Africa

For years, Ms. Maphumulo struggled to support her young family in urban South Africa. She cleaned houses, took on yard work, and fell deeper into poverty with each year. Then the Bartel Arts Trust (BAT) introduced her to izimbenge, basket-weaving using coiled telephone wire. One of the first women to learn the technique, Ms. Maphumulu today is an embodiment of what folk artistry, in the best hands, can achieve.

She has managed to build a home for her family, educate her children, and draw from herself extraordinary reserves of creativity. Her vividly colored, woven baskets – among the most eye-catching works at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market – have been featured at the Smithsonian Arts Festival and the New Orleans Jazz Festival. “Weaving has transformed my life,” she says with quiet dignity and irrefutable accuracy.

The Art:

Coiled telephone-wire basket weaving, in little more than two decades, has become a traditional art form in “an urban area of South Africa where none existed before,” according to Wired, a new book about the weavings. The baskets, graced with figures, scenes, or kaleidoscopically colorful designs, grew out of the very old Zulu cultural tradition of weaving Ilala palm leaves into baskets or lids to cover beer barrels. But city dwellers in Durban, South Africa, with no access to palm leaves, had to find a new material to weave. Multicolored, plastic-insulated copper telephone wires became their medium. The sturdy telephone-wire baskets created from these very modern materials manage to hearken back to old stories and patterns, while also underscoring how folk art can evolve in the modern world.