A Walk in Jeremy Frey’s Forest

One that stuck with me was the German word Waldeinsamkeit, the feeling of being alone in the forest. It conjures a sense of calm, contemplation, and deep connection with nature.

Waldeinsamkeit might be considered a sort of throughline in the art of Jeremy Frey, a Passamaquoddy basketmaker. He literally begins his work by walking through Maine’s forests looking for ash trees and assessing whether they have the right qualities for making baskets. He has to know these trees inside and out, anticipating which ones might be hiding crooked grains, knots, or other irregularities. Once he’s selected and harvested a tree, he engages in the painstaking labor of processing the timber: stripping the bark from the trunk, rhythmically pounding the log with the back of an axe to separate the growth rings, and splitting the fibrous layers into thinner and thinner strips. Is there a more intimate or intense way of coming to know a tree than disassembling it with your bare hands?

To prepare the wood for weaving, Frey slices it into narrow widths—some as thin as 1/32 of an inch—using gauge cutters he made from sharpened steel clock springs. Sometimes he leaves the wood its natural blond color; more often, he dyes the fibers a luminous array of hues. Finally, he engages in the methodical, repetitive, and solitary act of weaving—over, under, over, under—basically reconstituting the fragments of tree trunks over a wooden mold that he turned on a lathe. His hands spend months completing one of his elegant and intricate baskets, providing his mind ample time to muse on and mull over his next creation. Each step of Frey’s art is a communion with wood as he transforms it from one sublime state of being to another.

In an early planning meeting for Jeremy Frey: Woven—the artist’s first solo museum exhibition, opening at the Art Institute on October 26—I stated to colleagues that I wanted audiences to experience “supreme aesthetic satisfaction” upon seeing Frey’s baskets, and the phrase became one of the guiding principles of the exhibition. In essence, I hoped viewers would walk through the galleries feeling that quiet, meditative connection with the wooden works that Frey experienced as he made them. The more than 50 ash baskets in the exhibition—the vast majority of the works the artist has produced in his lifetime—are a forest of Frey’s making.

Grouped in colorful groves and copses, Frey’s ash baskets offer museumgoers a chance to experience the peace and beauty of Waldeinsamkeit within the unlikely setting of an art museum. 

But like many things in nature, the exhibition also contains elements that may elicit melancholy. The final gallery concludes with the artist’s first time-based-media work, Ash. As the video follows Frey through the forest and his act of creation, it offers a wordless meditation on this timeless art. Indeed, Frey’s path through the forest follows the footsteps of generations of Native basket weavers who have come before him; but this enduring and culturally significant art form is currently threatened by an invasive insect, the emerald ash borer. Brought to the Americas on wooden shipping pallets as a consequence of globalization, and first discovered here in the Great Lakes region, the beetle has now spread as far as Maine, leaving a wake of decimated ash trees. The boreholes that the beetle creates leave the wood useless for basketmaking. 

But the emerald ash borer is only one of the many pending threats to this art form. More broadly, the human impact on the environment is causing climbing temperatures, increased droughts, and more frequent and damaging wildfires that endanger forests across North America. What will be the future of this art form if there is no longer any wood to produce it? In the meantime, Frey is stockpiling lumber as fast as he can to sustain him through the rest of his career. With the fate of ash basketmaking hanging in the balance, Frey’s video ends abruptly, even jarringly, with ash turning to ash. Although Frey states that the meaning of the video is intentionally ambiguous, its fiery conclusion might be interpreted as a kind of eulogy.

In the end, Frey reminds us that we can never be completely alone in the forest: we carry with us the traditions, knowledge, and languages accumulated by our forebearers; and we must always keep in mind the generation who will follow us through the woods after we have left it. Our own time in the forest is transient—just as this exquisite forest of Frey’s making will be temporary. Jeremy Frey: Woven is only on view October 26, 2024–February 10, 2025.

—Andrew Hamilton, associate curator, Arts of the Americas

Jeremy Frey: Woven is organized by the Portland Museum of Art, Maine.

Sponsors

This exhibition is made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.

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