March 19 and April 9, 2016
Kelly Church (Gun Lake Band in Michigan, and a Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Ojibwe descendant) is an award-winning black ash basket weaver, Woodlands style painter, birch bark biter, and educator. For her “Black Ash Basket Make and Take Workshop”, Church brought to the Coe Center a black ash log, which is threatened by extinction from the Emerald ash borer, and showed us how the splints are harvested, as well as worked with us to actually weave our own baskets. They turned out to be amazing.
1. Harvesting splints from a Black Ash log.
2. Kelly Church explaining splints.
Church is an artist dedicated to the power of nature, material, and to tradition through the past to today. She creates multi-media baskets that connect the teachings of her ancestors to her contemporary experience as an artist.
