Unaware then of the foreshadowing, Jerry Maxey grew up working in his father’s upholstery shop, restoring furniture and caning chairs. His love of process and craft started at an early age. So, unsurprisingly, thirty-five years ago, having moved to Greenville, he embarked on a journey to keep creating in whatever ways he could.
“I started off working with wood, but at one point, I found myself in an apartment in Greenville and didn’t have access to any shops, and I was going crazy until a friend of mine gave me a book of basket patterns,” he says. “I made a couple of baskets out of the book, and I just got obsessed with it.” But his newfound passion for basket weaving couldn’t eclipse his love of woodworking. Eventually, Maxey returned to working in wood shops, allowing him to marry the two seemingly disparate crafts, seamlessly blending lathe-turned wooden bases and rims for his rattan and seagrass cord baskets.
Though now each basket holds the unmistakable fingerprint of his elaborately woven, wood-adorned designs, it didn’t start that way. Maxey’s earliest baskets were completely rattan and seagrass cord. But after gaining inspiration from an artist who wove “barnacles” onto found pieces of driftwood, Maxey began salvaging his own wood from downed trees and other found places to create bases for his signature pieces.
Later, he would master the complex process of including lathe-turned rims, which he describes as a highly technical and skilled process. “Attaching the rim to the top is a real challenge because you have to weave the opening of the piece into the precise size of the rim. It took quite a bit of practice, but eventually, I figured out a way to do it, and that’s my contribution to the art of basket weaving.”
Art of Basket-Making
In creating his designs, Maxey continues to learn and experiment with the ways and means of executing his pieces. Employing a technique called wicker-weaving, Maxey uses a predetermined number of vertical spokes attached to his wood bases and rims that are shaped and interwoven with horizontal elements of dyed seagrass cord or rattan called weavers.
And though the art of basket-making is among the oldest forms of functional and aesthetic art in the world, Maxey’s baskets are far from simple in their design or execution. “There’s a lot of math involved in making these designs. For this piece that has vertical stripes on it, as I go around, each weaver lands back on top of itself. And the colors stack up and make a stripe. That is because it’s thirty-two spokes, and I’m using four weavers. Thirty-two is a multiple of four, which means that each weaver comes back to the same spot and makes a stripe. But if I had thirty-one spokes and the same four weavers, it would make a spiral because each time it came around, it would be one off, so it would spiral its way up. It certainly takes time to learn these things.”
For Maxey, this is an experiential art form as much as a planned technical one, sharing that sometimes his creations move with a mind all their own, creating patterns or elements that often catch him by surprise. But understanding his process, it’s no surprise these unexpected creative elements occur. Maxey, who spends time meditating daily, often finds his mind filled with thoughts on basket patterns. “I think, ‘I wonder what would happen if …’ and that’s what gets me going.”
And like any true fanatic, he is not content to solely turn those moments of meditative inspiration into production for his business but also into active engagement in keeping the ages-old tradition alive by sharing his skills and knowledge with others, teaching workshops and classes on basket-making.
Though these days, the semi-retired Maxey has slowed down on shows and production, he’s still using the same medium he did all those years ago in his father’s furniture store to expand his ideas for where his work might lead him. “There’s a structural integrity limit that, once I get to a certain size, it just becomes too flexible,” he says. “But I keep wanting to explore metal spokes that I can shape so I can go even bigger and more spectacular,” he says. He and his fans are excited to see the results of this exploration.
See more of Maxey’s work at jerrymaxey.com.
Photography by Eli Warren.
