YOU DON'T NEED TO BE GREAT TO START BUT YOU DO NEED TO START TO BE GREAT.

QUEEN – A WOVEN CHESS PIECE

October 27, 2019

I spent much time thinking about the type of artwork I would enter in the competition at the Fourth World Wicker and Basketry Festival that I would be attending this summer in Nowy Tomsyl, Poland. I wanted to produce something uniquely interesting rather than just submitting another banal, conventional piece. Time marched on and the festival date drew closer, but I remained without any ideas or guidelines.

About three weeks before departure, I decided to visit my weaving mentor, Hertzel Auster. Perhaps I would find inspiration there. I noticed that he had produced four somewhat amorphous minibaskets and asked what they represented. Auster told me that he had created four chess pieces. The idea fascinated me and I made up my mind to weave chess pieces—a king and queen—as my entry in the festival competition.

I began searching for pictures of chess games, seeking ideas for the shape and form of these pieces. I decided to produce clear, straightforward, traditional pieces rather than abstract objects.

At the first stage, I planned to weave both a king and a queen, but the results differed somewhat from the original plans. I practiced at home and found that the queen took me over ten hours to complete. As we are allotted exactly 15 hours, I realized that I would not have the time to produce two pieces. At the time, I thought I could keep to my original idea by producing smaller objects. I tried weaving a queen that was 30% smaller than the original, but the result was not as precise, even though it took about eight hours to produce. I was working under pressure to complete it quickly—a condition that took its toll in accuracy. Eventually, I realized that two chess pieces were out of the question.

I chose to weave only a queen—a sound decision, because it took me 12-13 hours to complete, working comfortably without unnecessary pressure or fear.