In Autumn 2017 I had an exhibition at Shirley Sherwood gallery of some early work I made during my residency at Kew, and we were able to show objects from Spruce’s collection in the gallery. It was a wonderful opportunity to let them be seen and discussed, and as part of this I gave talks in the gallery and spoke about some of the objects we had selected to display. One of the pieces, a calabash which had a handle fitted, was held wrapped by two crossed lengths of curauá (Ananas lucidus Mill.) which Spruce referred to as a water carrier or bucket.

One of the guests in the tour said to me, ‘for such an everyday object, why has it been made to be so beautiful, perhaps there is another use for it?’ I thought it was interesting point that everyday should equate to more mundane for her. That the time given over to making such a piece didn’t merit its use as a water carrier. I thought of Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Book of Fiction and that line, ‘A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ [1] What else would be better than to be a carrier?
I have always loved this particular wrapped calabash but never have I known exactly what to do about it. I have drawn it several times but never understood how to capture its glowing shell-like surface. I made a piece of ceramic in unfired porcelain, that held the same shape. Just recently I thought I would start to try to weave a section of the length that wraps around it and see where that takes me.
I started to make cordage from the dry piles of tucum (Astrocaryum sp.) I brought back from NW Amazonia. As a note on this substitution, curauá is from the Family Bromeliaceae and looks like a pineapple, and is a species commonly found Venezuela,French Guiana, Peru and Brazilian Amazon, and tucum is a palm tree native to Brazil; found in capoeiras and terra firma forest.[2] However they are commonly substituted for each other, and in several objects in Spruce’s notes he says either one or the other is used but isn’t specific about which. I am using tucum as it’s what I have available.
At first I took small bundles and weaving into a cord but it was a bit too thick. I stopped and started a new one, and the cord was a bit neater and took a bit more concentration to keep the thickness even. But then I noticed all these objects around me here (a fan, a bag of carajuru, a bracelet I made with Francy) where tucum is used to bind things, and I saw that I had to make the lengths even thinner. And what I noticed when I started to do that was it became far easier and took less concentration, I no longer needed to focus on my hands or the material but instead could do it while doing other things, as my mother might do while she knits. While I am listening to lectures, or talking to people online, all the while I can be making lengths of this cordage to be woven into lengths for that calabash water carrier.


This in turn made me think of the categories that we can organise material objects by.
By use: water carrier, domestic tool, or fisherman’s water bottle.
By plant: calabash (Crescentia cujete) tucum (Astrocaryum sp.) curauá (Ananas lucidus Mill.)
How about by time? Could there be a category of material that gets made while other things are happening? Do these things therefore take on some of the quality of a child sitting outside a door listening in on a conversation, absorbing and ready to become something else? Can distinctions be made between full attention things to half attention things? Actually, by making this cordage I notice I am much more focused on the other task at hand, the listening or talking or even reading task. So maybe it should be called the thing to give attention.
I asked Erick if he had seen this pattern woven before, and he immediately said yes, it’s called puçá-stitch, and something very similar is used in making traps used for shrimps. He drew a picture and said he had a video somewhere he could find to show me how to do it. So there starts to become some connections between water, holding, containing and now I feel I have more a way to work with this material. Working towards one idea initially, but now with ideas around water, time, and containment in that place.
[1] Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Terra Ignota, 2019
[2] Martins, Luciana. 2021. A Maloca Entre Artefatos e Plantas: Guia Da Coleção Rio Negro de Richard Spruca Em Londres. São Paulo, SP: ISA.