Willow Coffins: Community deathcare, ancestral communication, and tending a living tradition

To attend, you must RSVP. Members only, please. Send an email with the subject “April Zoom" to ColumbiaBasinBasketryGuild@gmail.com. Please put your full name and email address in the body of the message. We will email you a meeting invitation a few days before the event.

Maureen Walrath

“Mo” Walrath is devoted to willow and tending the living tradition of basket weaving as a response to the ever-changing needs of the living world. She is a soft and fierce student of birth, death, burial, and blood mysteries, reverent farmer, and threshold worker providing care for her community in emergent ways through the vessels she weaves.

She learned to weave willow baskets in the Coast Range of Oregon - connecting her craft with the life of plants. There she learned about willow, their growing rhythms and patterns, the harvesting and curing of the plant for weaving, and teaching others to weave. Mo is a guest on S’Klallam land in rain shadowed Port Townsend, Washington, where cormorants dive and eagles tell glacial memory sky stories with ancestral lines from the west coast of Ireland and Main River lands in Germany.

Woven Thresholds is a project that brings individuals and communities into an intimate relationship with life, death, and beauty through the craft of willow basketry. The vessels are woven with willow grown, tended, and harvested by hand from local lands as a response to the inert, extractive, and sterile over-culture. Woven Thresholds re-imagines, instead, a collaborative, healing pathway for some of our choices around death and dying, creation, consumption, and decomposition. woventhresholds.com