WICKERY AND PLACE

As ‘plastics’ continually get a bad press communities all over the world are looking around them and trying to figure out what can be done and how it came about that all this contention got to be so difficult – and so full of angst. Commentators very often look back to try and make sense of it all to provide coordinates for a way forward with or without this now ‘ubiquitous material’ in our cultural landscapes. Somehow the multiple narratives layered upon each other and the speed in which they have evolved to make our cultural memories less and less reliable and our aspirations perhaps more and more elusive. 

Somehow, the trust that was once invested in communities' ‘placedness’ has become less secure. Somehow, communities’ cultural realities are being challenged. Somehow, communities’ ‘placedness’ seems less and less tangible as ‘place’ becomes more elastic than ‘our valley’, ‘our street’, our ‘neighbourhood’, our this or that. Yet, unavoidably we find ourselves belonging to, and in,  places – and there are always consequences. In so many ways ‘plastics’ challenge our trust in the things we take from, and bring into, places. We want to trust them to return gently to the earth – one way or another. 

In the end plastics in all their machinations seem to invoke 'global imperatives' and there is more than a little irony to be found in the plastic flotsam and jetsam that is finding its way into enormous ‘rubbish rafts’ far out to sea almost out of sight and almost out of mind. 

Currently, as ‘a material’, plastics seems to touch all of us all the time and all at once – and in ways we can hardly comprehend. Typically, plastics comes to us from far away and rarely if ever by our own hand. The stuff it replaces, and has replaced, and even yet promises to replace, so very often came from very close to hand – from our places, our own cultural landscapes, the places we understand as 'home'. 

The stuff here is the 'nonplastics', the nonminerals, the organic living stuff from which our tools, our clothing, our shelters and ‘furnishings’ can be made – the stuff of wickery. 

‘Wickery’ in its various cultural contexts is an idea loaded with interwoven layer upon layer of narratives, most of which are to do with belonging and ‘placedness’. The wickery that evolves from our  'home places' speaks loudly of them and the cultural imperatives that shape home places – oftentimes subliminally. Ultimately, wickery has become an expansive idea given that in its colonial contexts it carries with it a cargo of ‘elsewhereness’. Simultaneously, it is absorbed into colonised places whilst soaking up local sensibilities and adapting to ‘elsewhere’.

Histories, and the storytelling that go with them, all too often lose their vitality and potency with the passing of time and our preoccupations with newness. As well, wickery has much to say about the here and now albeit that ‘its time’ is most often understood as having past. When examined in some detail the practice of ‘wickery’ and its relativity to place and ‘placedness’ holds lessons worth relearning.  With all this comes the possibility of opening up new social, cultural and technical frontiers.

Ray Norman Jan 2018