Centrum Artist Weaves Port Townsend, Chicago and Nigeria Together Through Baskets and Stories
Art news by Melissa O’Neil, Centrum Artist Residency Program
PORT TOWNSEND, WA — Centrum’s Artist Residency program is delighted to welcome visual artist ebere agwuncha. As part of the In the Making residency, agwuncha is presenting a visual lecture on Thursday, February 5th, from 4-5 p.m. titled “Meditation on: woven fishing ports”.
ebere agwuncha is an Igbo-American artist and educator based in Chicago, IL. As part of her practice back home, agwuncha offers free basketweaving classes for the community. Her students are mostly Black women, and they come to weave but also to find a connection point, something that ties them to their roots, but also to each other.
In her show, agwuncha uses film excerpts, archival images, fishing nets and baskets, and videos to connect two places that are centered on the fishing industry, Port Townsend and agwuncha’s mother’s home, Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
The show is an ode to her past-life self. She had a dream that she was a fisherperson, and each net and basket in the show are a nod to the fishing craft. Crafting, like storytelling, is important in Nigerian culture. With each net and basket, agwuncha works to weave water, fishing, the stories we tell, the points of connection we make, where we come from—it is all a part of each piece in the show.
The baskets, ceramic pieces, and nets that agwuncha made are scattered on the tables in her studio. Large beach stones weigh down a metal ring as she ties knots, wrapping the jute twine around an orange shuttle, wrapping, tying, over and over, creating a pattern, telling stories. The process is a meditation. The nets and baskets are decorated with cowrie shells, pieces of ivory, and orange glass beads, giving the nets gravity, embedding the baskets with a spine of shells.
In many African countries, including Nigeria, cowrie shells were both a form of currency and used in spiritual practices to honor ancestors. In the exhibition, agwuncha pays homage to local Indigenous basket-weavers with a still frame, honoring the original stewards of this land, who came before us, who are still here.
A single channel video work documents Lake Michigan through a binocular lens, the circular frame offering a vignette of the water with its whitecaps, boats in and out of the frame, plants playing in the foreground, the binocular circle acting as a port hole.
The show is a play on shadows and netting, weaving nets and baskets, connecting stories from one port town to another, with an underlying sense of how we are all connected, even if where we come from is vastly different.
agwuncha’s show is on view until February 6th at Fort Worden, Building 305, South Gallery, with a visual lecture on Thursday, February 5 at 4 p.m.
