SELECTED ESSAYS

"The Fiber of Our Lives," by Christine Temin, New England Home, May/June 2007

Lissa Hunter takes basket-making to new levels. The Portland, Maine, artist uses raffia, linen thread and other textiles to probe the essence of humanity.

Saying that Lissa Hunter makes baskets is a bit like saying that Picasso doodled. She does. He did. But in both cases the work transcends those simple categories. Hunter's baskets are about life, loss, love and death. While she has made baskets that function in the sense that you could, say, put a bouquet of dried flowers in them, they're not really meant for carrying anything other than the meaning of human existence.

In Hunter's studio in an old brick building in Portland, Maine, drawers and shelves are filled with buttons, shells, stones, feathers and beads, all key ingredients in her early work. However, she says, "I rarely use them anymore. Something happened in the work, a shift."

The "something" was the 1991 loss of her father, just as she was preparing for a show at the Gallery on the Green in Lexington, Massachusetts. Her baskets, always exquisite and meticulously constructed, "used to be more decorative," she explains. "They were well-made, but didn't have much to say beyond that."

During her father's illness, though, and after his death, they took on a new solemnity and simplicity. Since then, her coiled baskets have mostly been made of raffia or waxed linen thread, with less emphasis on the adornments of the past.

She works with themes. Before the 1991 show, she says, "I was thinking about power. I asked people about their definition of power." The responses ranged from storms to sex. "A nine-year-old girl said being a princess would be power," Hunter says. "Then, when my father was so sick, I thought about powerlessness." One work from that era, Hostages, is a series of little raffia baskets in irregular cone shapes, each bound with spruce roots. They have an anthropomorphic feel, slumping toward each other. They resemble, albeit in miniature, Rodin's great Burghers of Calais, noble prisoners on their way to their death.

Some of Hunter's work is two-dimensional collage. A Cold Wind Blows, made of paper, metal, paint, oil stick, thread and pencil, was given a second name, the Ascension, by her dealers. It looks like an abstracted gown with a billowing blue train, rising toward heaven. To Hunter, it might also represent the ascension of her father. While her work comes out of the events of her life, that life hasn't been one of the clichéd struggling artist. "I ought to have had a tortured childhood in extreme poverty," she says. "But I didn't."

In the opulently illustrated 2006 book, Lissa Hunter: Histories Real and Imagined, author Abby Johnston calls Hunter's upbringing "white bread." Hunter, born in Indianapolis in 1945 agrees--literally. In her corner of the Midwest at the time, she says, "Having whole wheat bread would have been considered suspect." Her father was a salesman; her mother sewed and braided rugs. "She was always making things," Hunter recalls. "That's a huge part of who I am."

Hunter earned both a BA and an MFA from Indiana University. Her field was weaving. It was only after surgery in 1975 left her too weak to use a loom that she made her first basket. Instantly captivated by basketry, she has by now devoted more than half her life to it.

After leaving a teaching job at Mansfield University in Pennsylvania, she relocated in 1979 to Maine, where she found a supportive community of artists and a burgeoning art scene, thanks to a growing number of galleries, the Portland Museum of Art and the Maine College of Art.

While she still leads workshops, since moving to Maine she's managed, sometimes just barely, to earn a living through her art rather than through full-time teaching. She exhibits frequently, all around the country, and her works are in the permanent collections of institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Hunter came of age as an artist just as contemporary basketry came of age as an art. She cites the 1986 book The Basketmaker's Art: Contemporary Baskets and Their Makers, edited by Rob Pulleyn, as an important validation of the field. The book focused on twenty-six artists, Hunter included.

She talks about an ongoing, lively debate in the basket world. "A lot of contemporary basket makers use odd materials," she says. "'Oh, wouldn't it be a kick to make a basket out of license plates!'" she says, giving an imaginary extreme example. Her attitude is the opposite. "I like materials that are anonymous," she says, "so I can impose meanings on them."

Those meanings come from sources as diverse as the theories of Charles Darwin to Abbot and Costello movies.

Her 2004 Evolution/Extinction is basked on Darwin's warning that as a species becomes rarer, it is in danger of disappearing altogether. Hunter expresses this idea through a horizontal parade of little baskets on a shelf-like pedestal. They start out small at the left, grow into robustness, then dwindle. Finally, at the right, the shelf is unoccupied. The message could hardly be expressed more effectively by a painter or sculptor.

The Abbot and Costello piece, Bud, Lou and Monsieur Magritte, is based on a 1940s movie in which the two comedians were ghosts who could pass through walls. Hunter's translation of the plot is an ordinary black chair sawed in two, each half placed against a wall, implying that its other half has passed through to the other side. Small round red baskets that look like apples, littered on and around the chair halves, are a nod to the inexplicable floating objects of the surrealist René Magritte.

Hunter doesn't take herself too seriously. Some of her works include a few smooth gray-blue beach stones. "I collect them by the shore," she says airily. "Wearing a white gown. At daybreak."

Then, erupting with laughter, she announces, "I buy them at a stone supplier who usually sells by the ton."

"Lissa Hunter: Finding Her Truth," by Stuart Kestenbaum, Surface Design, Winter 2008

Lissa Hunter is an explorer. In her art making she goes on journeys and enters into a world where not everything is clear. But for her, the exploration isn't a linear journey--it's circling back to what she has always known, only with each circle her art becomes richer and more mysterious. "Home," T.S. Eliot writes in his poem East Coker, "is where we start from," and for Lissa Hunter her first home was the conservative, stable Midwest of the 1950s. She recollects that, growing up, art was something that she didn't know about. At the same time, she remembers feeling that she would someday understand what it was and what it meant. The seeds of the way she would work and what she would become were already planted. Her mother, Ruth Purdy, sewed and reupholstered furniture and her father, "Cordy" Purdy, built furniture and repaired cars. He was also an avocational magician. And her paternal grandmother, Hardie Oglesby, always loved things that looked "dug up."

Looking backward, it is always easier to see the patterns or paths that we have created in our own lives, and looking at Lissa Hunter's work over time it is easy to see the traces of these most early influences: the repaired world, the elements that reveal a part of the story, and the love of materials.

She was a literature major at Indiana University for two years before changing to painting in the Fine Arts Department. She then went on to graduate school in textiles there, receiving an MFA in textile design in 1971. After graduation, she headed to Pennsylvania where she taught at Mansfield University and continued weaving tapestries. Moving to Maine in 1979, she began to look for a "marketable art" to support herself as a studio artist. She started working with both baskets and paper, but separately. She felt constrained by the surfaces of the baskets, which were determined by the structures themselves, and realized that if she were to put paper on the basket form, she could change the surface. She began creating her signature pieces at that timeÑthe coiled raffia basket with a paper skinÑalong with stitched collages.

She was still searching, though, for her own artistic voice. It took her a long time, she says, to realize that "the personal aspects of someone's voice is what art is," and in dealing with her father's illness and death in 1991, her work began to change and become more personal. She was making work for a show at the Gallery on the Green in Lexington, Massachusetts, and found herself making work that was more emotional and drew on her own history. She found her work becoming more mysterious, and the planning sketches that she was making were evolving into angelic vertical figures, protective capes, and other guardian forms. Her father's death and the resulting artwork were for her the strongest emotional experience that she had ever gone through. It brought together her art and her family and made her realize that others "could see their truth in your truth and that's (as an artist) what you have to give."

The work that Lissa Hunter has made since that time reveals a distinctive voice, one that masterfully combines content and technique. While her work is informed by the traditions of basketry, she sees herself as a sculptor. In the mid-'90s, she stopped making stand-alone baskets and placed them in and on boxes. Her intent wasn't to have the boxes be pedestals, but to be integral parts of the pieces, to make a larger context for the work. She makes full-size foam core models of the boxes, which are then built in medium density fiberboard by Doug Meader, a friend and woodworker.

Her work has become more complex and layered. While she works with formal elements of line, shape and color, she is simultaneously working with ideas. It's clearly an integrated process and for her "the process is everything." A single idea may drive the development of a whole body of work. In the series that she created for dis/appear (Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York in 2004), she knew that she wanted to deal with the idea of disappearance. The idea of things that disappear became her lens, her filter for looking at the world. Disappearance could range from the vanishing marks of the cave paintings at Lascaux, to a lost garden tool, to the horrendous loss of life at Hiroshima.

Or, more recently, in Uncommon Things (Jane Sauer Gallery, Santa Fe, 2006), pieces evolved out of investigation of the power that objects have in our lives and culture combined with objects that "people hold dear." She wrote to friends to see what objects in their lives had that power and created work that responded to their stories. The objects--the hammer that was passed from father to son, the red shoes that were the only remnant of a two-year-old's adoption journey from Korea to the United States--speak of the power that the commonplace has in our lives.

Lissa Hunter is digging deeply and creating work that resonates on many levels. This is reflected not only in the ideas, but in the way that she is working. She is building surfaces and erasing surfaces, using acrylic paint, colored pencils, and the steady and rhythmic coiling of basket forms. She is driven by the process, the making, the idea. She can't stop working on a piece, she says, "until it's singing."

The layering that her work has achieved is not only the layering of technique, but the layering of ideas, and of loss and love and memory. After the line "Home is where one starts from" in East Coker, T.S. Eliot continues, "As we grow older/ The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/ Of dead and living..." Lissa Hunter sees her job as an artist not just to make more objects, but to explore those things that connects us to one another and to a world that is at once familiar and mysterious.

--Stuart Kestenbaum is a poet and Director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. His third book of poems, Prayers and Run-on Sentences, was published in 2007 by Deerbrook Editions.

Catalogue essay for dis/appear, by Stu Kestenbaum, 2004

In her exhibition dis/appear, Lissa Hunter addresses the often mysterious realms of gain and loss through which we come to know and understand ourselves. Things come and go from our lives. We can lose mundane material items like car keys and eye glasses. We can forget last night's dream when we were flying over the world at dusk, as if this were the most natural way to travel. We can forget the names of our elementary school teachers. We can forget the brilliant solution to society's problems that we had when we were driving on the highway. Perhaps it blew out of the window like a seed in the wind.

At the same time we're losing, though, we're gaining as well. Sometimes our lives can feel like a sedimentary accumulation of bills and phones calls and items we've accumulated without intending to. Other times what we've thought was lost comes back. While we may have forgotten the details of second grade, we remember its essence in an autumn's leaves swirling in a playground or in the wind that follows a yellow school bus. And although we may not understand the natural world in the profound way that our ancestors did, we are creatures who are tied to the rhythms of the planet. In ad infinitum, Lissa has created a series of four pieces--one for each season--hung in a circle. It's a configuration that reminds us that we are always turning and returning, forgetting and remembering. This eternal circle of appearance and reappearance is within us, even if in our world it's covered with asphalt or obscured by the hum of machines.

As we grow older we accumulate more ideas and possessions. They enter and leave our lives. In Tool Rack, with its one missing implement and the empty space where it once belonged, we can see those things that were once with us and are now gone: the lost tool or book or friendship or moment.

The text that Lissa incorporates in many of the pieces is also a reminder of what builds up and is transformed over time. In Palimpsest, the layering of words makes these texts have their own archeology. We can dig under one layer and find another. This can sometimes mean that we discover something more important beneath and that we can recover what was once lost to us. At other times the surfaces resemble only a remnant of what we once knew, memories and histories disappearing before our eyes. The boxes that are a part of her work are scarred, too, as if they had been battered by experience, like the wall of a house that has held the lives of many generations.

In Lascaux/Hiroshima Lissa examines loss, both the slow disappearance of geology with its endless wind and rain, or an immediate, horrific and inexplicable loss from the atomic bomb. Either way, experiencing loss transforms us. Eventually we face a world without our parents, or our brothers and sisters, or partners or friends. We see a world where our culture and landscape have changed around us.

These changes can destroy us and make us bitter, or, if we can see another's loss with the same heart as we see our own, it helps make us more compassionate. And if we look at nature, we can see that nothing is lost, only transformed. What disappears may reappear in a new context. The road kill raccoon becomes the crow's meal. The fallen tree becomes the rich nursery soil for the next generation. The frost kills the plant and its seeds blow in the wind and settle in another field. The grandmother's facial expressions reappear in the grandchildÕs face. In these ways everything continues.

Still, in the face of loss, we look, we search for reasons to carry on. It's clear that for Lissa making is a way of doing this. Her coiling of baskets--a slow and repetitious process--is itself a deliberate act, a meditation on rebuilding. Persistence, a grid of 225 baskets rigidly arranged on a field of dark swirls, is an exercise in tenacity. It shows us metaphorically how we continue, one act at a time.

When I watch Lissa's hands work as she creates her baskets, I can see an unconscious rhythm--wherever the mind might wander the hands are busy going about their business. These hands twist coil upon coil until the walls of the vessels are built up. A vessel can hold nothing and everything, emptiness and fullness. It can hold what we've gained and what we've lost. The coiling, the slow building of a piece, is a remembrance of this. It also harkens back to our ancient heritage of working with our hands, how we learned to lash and mend, to build and to repair, so that we could survive.

"Lissa Hunter" by Richard A. Schindler, American Craft, April/May 2004, Erie Art Museum, Erie Pennsylvania, September 12, 2003 to February 1, 2004

"Histories," the title of the Maine artist Lissa Hunter's exhibition, could as easily be "Appearances Can Be Deceiving." Her mixed-media pieces are deceptively simple and certainly disarming in their apparent emotional transparency. However, her art confidently traverses a wide terrain, from world politics and commerce through geological time and natural history to familial autobiography. Each work combines painstaking technique with a wealth of detail that, for the most part, feels intimate and profound.

Boxlike forms, constructed from paper- and plaster-covered fiberboard, function as frame, niche, shelf and ledge. Hunter's use of trompe l'oeil transforms the surfaces of each work. Acrylic paint, pencil and occasional stitching mimic the effects of writing, veined natural textures and decorative wood surfaces. Hand-drawn images, illustrations, maps and transference prints are embedded within some of these surfaces. Many of the boxes enfold or support fragile vessels of coiled waxed linen or raffia made to look like miniature baskets, hand-thrown vases, carved wooden bottles or glazed ceramics.

The serial works offer a trenchant narrative on natural history. The seven-part Morse Mountain Suite, 2003, seems to be a relatively conventional homage to a nature preserve, celebrating such features as fog, woods, grasses, rocks and sun. Each piece, however, depicts the personal experience of a complex landscape, with the distinctive materiality of the named element in the foreground and a conceptual reference added as well. Night Sky, for example, delineates a painted image of a gradually darkening atmosphere across the planar surface of the main body of the work. A manifestation of the constellations emerges above the box on a semicircular panel, resembling the zodiacal index of an illuminated manuscript. A dipper, literally a humorous aside, hangs from a peg inserted into the side of the painted container.

On the Origin of Species, 2001, presents a transition in eight stages, from white egg-shaped vessel to a dark loam-colored square. The transformation is less cinematic (a series of static frames) than accretive (a gradual shift of viewpoint over time). A different sense of the passage of time informs Hymn, 2000, in which a russet-colored surface is partially worn to reveal serried rows of irregular triangles (reminiscent of the neumes of early musical notation). At the center, within a niche, stands a capped vessel of dark golden hue, suggesting the autumnal timbre of an ancient song of praise.

Treaty, 1999, the largest work in the exhibition, sets a tone of solemnity that slowly dissolves the closer one approaches. Penciled scrawls across the surface echo cursive script on yellowed parchment. The effect is one of quickly scanned text, the shape of words and flow of sentences suggested, yet never fully realized by the viewer. The bifurcated woven vessel enshrined within the upper register of the piece is loosely bound by a scrap of cloth, suggesting the fragile nature of a truce.

Not all the works are equally successful. Biography, 1999, a long shelf covered with similarly colored objects ostensibly representing the life of the artist's mother, resembles a photographic setup for the advance publicity of a Ken Burns-style documentary. More poignantly, Tribute (Mother), 1998, evokes a piercing sense of loss and faded memory through its smudged white surface, as if a text had been imperfectly erased. A small beaded bowl sits quietly within its shallow niche. In a row above it hang a key, several folded decorative notepapers and a slender brush. They suggest secrets yet to be unlocked or hoped-for messages unrevealed. Several rounded stones lie on top of the work, as they do in the work Old Soul, 1999, in reference to the Judaic tradition of placing stones on a grave. Hunter excels at these muted testaments to time and memory, conveying an elegiac mood resonant with unspoken meanings.

"Only Closer" by John Edwards, from the catalogue for Histories, Erie Art Museum, Erie Pennsylvania, September 13, 2003 to February 1, 2004

First she's a basket maker. First and foremost, and still. First she makes coiled baskets, precise, neat, colorful. Then she covers the exteriors, skins them in paper, paint and texture.

And her point is that when you approach them, they are--what? Ceramic? You can't tell. Adorned with leather, leaves, and beads. But when you look inside, there are fiber coils. Discovery, magic. To perform this magic you have to pick them up, handle them. That's what the paper and paint were there to protect and to allow in the first place.

Now the baskets are set in little niches, precisely their size, made for them. The niches are cut into slabs made for walls. To be seen. Hands off, the discovery inside no longer possible, no longer permitted.

So the secret of the baskets has been buried? Is this a cenotaph? Are these baskets votive offerings? Do they hold invisible remains? Are they empty?

She turns them upside down and they become people sometimes, seeds usually, peas in a pod waiting their chance. That chance doesn't always come, and she replaces them with rocks at times. Take your pick. Life or death.

Or perhaps history. The niches open up and grow, like seeds germinating, to become shelves on which histories unfold. Left to right, birth to death. Along the way, milestones of books, pencils, and yes, still baskets. If it wasn't about baskets first and last, she'd have abandoned them long ago.

Calligraphy scrubbed on the slab faces suggests stories but doesn't actually tell them, because they are not words. It's a kind of automatic writing, the impulse--the desire--to write, to tell the story, but restrained or thwarted, the shell of the story remaining.

Her work suggests a life that allows for orderly shelves, humor, craft, and wordplay. Yes, and orderly shelves.

Some or her baskets have lids. Some lids are stones, sealed tight. What's a basket anyway? Is a basket about what's in it, or what might be? Or what once was? You pick: the Holder or the Held.

The first piece I saw was "Fogbound," a small basket with a complex woven skin set in tiered fields of faint violet squares, and my immediate reaction was, "Michelangelo." I thought of his columns in the vestibule of the Laurentian Library, buried in the walls, a tension of compressed force much like his unfinished "Slaves," bodies trapped in stone struggling to break free. In Michelangelo's case that energy, forever entombed, was sexual. I considered the compressed energy in "Obsession," "Rare Earth," "Winter Sea." I looked at "Hymn," ("him/"hymen"), its phallic power combining both male and female sexual energy within a Tantric urn. Hymn, him, hymen.

Or maybe not. Perhaps the baskets have been set apart for special use. The niches, after all, have evolved to fit the baskets, not the other way around--regardless of what "Origin of Species" has to say. Or again, maybe not.

What comes first, the basket or the niche? Do they shape each other? The niches evolve and grow as much as the baskets do. In "Tea," with its maps and its long look back, there's no tea in those baskets. There never was. And what's more important anyway? The container or the contained? This seems to be the question. And her answer? She doesn't quite believe in the survival of the soul, that's what I think. Perhaps not even the soul itself.

But she believes in carcass and carapace and shell. If there's anything else, you'll have to supply it. And if there isn't--if under the comfort of the domestic, there is darkness?

Robert Frost would have understood her in a heartbeat.

Earth-tone and chi-quivering sack, boxes, earth tomes and virgin vessel. Go ahead, look inside. The hat is empty. See, folks? Step right up. The magician's hat is empty. Her father was a magician. Presto change-o! A rabbit. Fortunate fecund magic. And just when you thought the hat was empty. Following in his footsteps, she shows you the abyss and at the last second: Abracadabra! Life! But not life. Something that waits for life. Some Ur-book, unreadable in principal and meant to stay that way. A cup for life full of whatever you put into it.

Her baskets wait like little boats at dock. Safe and sound.

Or maybe not. Maybe adrift, empty and rudderless, lost in an empty sea. And Poof! The rabbit's gone. The hat is empty again.

Apparently you can read a book by its cover. Why do you buy a basket anyway? If a cardboard box would do the trick? Some Puritan strictness about the utility of beauty and the beauty of utility? We could talk for a long time about primal and ancient and traditional and folk. We'd use words like Anasazi and Yoruba. We'd say reeds. We'd say birch bark. We'd say hemp. We'd say Pueblo and Shinto. You'd say Feng Shui and laugh as though you hadn't meant it. I'd say Martha Stewart and laugh as though I had.

We look at these stories and we say color-field and minimalist in order to avoid admitting we are squinting for the Grand Design. We say vignette and snapshot, feeling again that these stark, ectoplasmic fuse boxes are more about the maker than the made. The omniscient hunter says "I", and we become I, the disembodied eye, who has to work hard to figure out what the story is about.

We say, "desert" or we say "hearth and frosted windows." And these archeological earth-tone-poems shape-shift with the words. And the story plays. This one is about--

We who squint for meaning and purpose in return for the Ah Ha! moment, discover that Hunter has been there ahead of us. All she asks is that we slow down a minute and tell a story, or listen for the echo of one told.

"Unspoken Stories" by Dennis Jarrett, from the catalogue for Stories, The Munson Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico, May, 2000

The first story I read by Lissa Hunter was called Stone Stack, a freestanding gray square with a stark, Euclidian niche in the middle filled with gray river rocks. Like a poem in the Japanese tradition of makuzuke ("connecting with the previous verse") it announces Hunter's intentions and its membership in a community of like-minded pieces. The others don't progress from it--each work predicts the others--but each is a unique variation on her theme. Hunter's explanation of Stone Stack is almost as basic as its subject. She writes that her childhood home was filled with incongruous objects, and that as a youngster she realized "they all had histories." Nothing on earth has as much history as the most ordinary rock, and Hunter's fascination with stones is perhaps as strong as her fascination with stories. "I think rocks are beautiful," she told me, "I like to hold them. Stones are the most primal material on earth."

Primal is at the top of the list when I imagine a short glossary of Hunter's Stories. Many of the other words in the glossary, as you'll see, would be scribbled in the kind of runic handwriting that requires a special monk to interpret, and he is nowhere to be found. Primal's cousin, Primitive, doesn't appear on the list because the sophistication of Hunter's vision rules it out, or at least keeps it in the background.

What Hunter does in Stories is to create a protective setting for her primal, or primary subject, usually a basket. Basketry is the foundation of her art, but at this point in her development the baskets both reflect and transcend their ancient heritage. These are the great-grandchildren of the woven boxes that once carried apples, ears of corn, or seed. What embodies and displays them is not simply a platform. It's an environment, and rather than yielding to the main subject, it contributes to it. Again, a Japanese term comes to mind: a tokonoma is an alcove "in which may be placed such objects as a calligraphy scroll, a stone, or a flower arrangement." I asked her about the impulse to sequester baskets inside these little caves.

"Most of the baskets, over a period of ten or twelve years, were much larger and stood on their own," she replied. "I wanted to find a way of incorporating them into a visual context. I didn't want pedestals, I wanted a place for them to be which would expand on the meaning of the piece. Since I also wanted text, I needed a flat surface. It was like a spiritual engineering problem."

You're quite likely to notice this visual context before you pay attention to the item it presents. And context is the perfect word, because often Hunter surrounds her baskets and her pots with words. As she says, she wanted text. You encounter Hunter's words like a young child or a foreign scholar because you're unable to read them. Yet you can almost sound them out--as Miss Fidditch used to say in first grade--you can almost break the code. Hunter's text is like the English of the future: it's recognizable, it's divided into words, it even has the character of a particular handwriter. It reminded me at first of looking at my own notes, scribbled in haste. I can see that I wrote them, but I don't know for sure what they say. Like molecules, like the Rosetta stone, like good art, these words require scrutiny. So does the volume which contains them.

Take a look at Rare Earth, for example. It's a 30-inch square with a protective slot which holds (tightly) a woven wire basket, an ovoid. Like her other baskets, it's made from the technique of coiling. Here, Hunter has used a coated wire ("hook-up wire" from Radio Shack), not a traditional material. It's covered with wax linen thread. "Rare Earth," she explained, "is made like the others. I cover all my baskets with paper, gluing it on, and then I paint it with a light wash of water-based pigment. This makes the paper look like a skin--it tightens onto its base. On tope of that I stitch a net onto the surface of the basket."

You want to know what's inside. (These pieces are a museum guard's nightmare. Alone with it one day, I took it out and looked. Inside was a piece of paper with a number on it. I replaced the basket and examined its surroundings.) There is a spread of indecipherable writing. You can see the shapes of words, even notice a certain cursive style--perhaps Hunter's own, or that of a wizard. After a few minutes, you're apt to decide you've come upon an impenetrable encryption.

But maybe not. If I lived with this piece, I'd spend a lot of time puzzling it out. Or I'd turn to an apparently easier chunk of discourse such as the text written on A Fool's Tools. On its front are six lines of script, enticingly black and well-defined. You stare at them. They're even more frustrating (read: interesting) than the vocabulary of Rare Earth because Hunter's private language looks maddeningly familiar. You create, or recreate, known words in the text, like thee and gain, some and arm. If you look away and try to find them again, they're gone, reabsorbed into their own tied tongue. On a ledge above the text are four striped containers, each filled with the pencils of an architectural alchemist, their stubby, blunt writing points sticking out. But of course they don't work, they don't write a single word for an ordinary person like me. I tried. Like certain functions on a computer, these pencils are "unavailable." Unless you know the secret.

If Hunters sculptures arrive at the eye like mail from the only native speaker of their language, why does she call them stories?

"One of the things I like about this collection of pieces," she told me, "is that other people see stories in them. They're a juxtaposition of objects and faux text, and so people come up with stories. I'm not trying to tell anybody anything, but I like the fact that people read them. I have no story in mind, but I write in response to what the piece is. I used to represent crows and I'd think what would crows write like? I realized the script can have its own voice."

In other words, Hunter's work provides the occasion for stories, the impetus to imagine or invent them. Faux or not, her different dialects almost beg for translation and in the process you find yourself looking for the words, the baskets, the rocks, the entire work, to mean something--to signify as well as be. It's conceptual art at its best--not the illustration of an idea you can parse, but the suggestion that certain kinds of meaning are beyond words.

Unspoken Farewell contains a small basket that looks like a wasp's nest because Hunter has crocheted knobby beads onto the wax-linen surface. It's capped with the river rock God seems to have made precisely for this basket. Naturally, it's covered with words. The script--I'm tempted to say the vocabulary--of this piece is so tiny and cribbed that it seems to have been generated not just by a different scribe, but by a different grammar than you see on the other pieces. It's unspoken and then some.

Reunion, the largest piece in the collection, is a sort of tribal display of baskets, all different sizes and as laden with family resemblances as an Icelandic picnic. At the base, each basket is coiled raffia palm fiber wrapped around cord. The top of the basket is a stiff paper surface which Hunter insists is "just art supply store stuff" but which, in her hands, takes on the appearance of something other-worldly. When I told her that, she said, "Good. I like to transform things. I imagined it as family reunion. You see these tattered snapshots of old people and kids who look vaguely the same, the overweight patriarch and matriarch usually in the middle. Think of, you know, Uncle Bud who lost his arm in the war. So this is like an album of photos."

But of course a great transformation has taken place. The relatives at their luncheon on the grass have been turned into baskets. Often during our conversations, Hunter spoke of her interest in transforming things. "Part of this interest," she said, "is, Can I do it? I want to make it mine. I like taking an anonymous, plain piece of paper and enhancing it, rumpling it, putting spackle all over it. By doing that I make it my own. I think it's my job to take anonymous things and make them my own."

Whatever you experience when you look at this adventurous work, whatever you bring to it, you're reading the stories of Lissa Hunter.

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