Artist Cathie Harper began making traditional and functional willow baskets after moving to Yellowknife about 13 years ago.

Cathie Harper weaves a sculptural rib basket during last week's Aurora Arts Society Art Expo in the Multiplex. She will lead workshops in Yellowknife from January through May. - Daron Letts/NNSL photo

Today she constructs ambitious towering sculptures woven from natural and found materials ranging from fireweed and dyed reed to multi-coloured speaker wire and strips of painted box board.

"If it's flat and flexible, I can weave it," she said. "I use wire, fur, flat materials, round materials, anything-I-can-think-of materials that can be used for a weave."

Harper drifted from familiar basketry traditions into innovative art in 2002 in preparation for her first exhibit at the Great Northern Arts

Festival in Inuvik. That's when she began adding driftwood, antler and clay bases to her basketry. She also started using non-traditional materials in her weaves.

That year her largest art piece, about two-feet tall, sold for $425 to a collector from Victoria, B.C. It featured birch bark, cattail and copper wire on a large driftwood base. Prior to that sale, no basket had sold at the Inuvik-based festival for more than $200, Harper said.

Buoyed by the positive response to her work in Inuvik, Harper continued to challenge the conventions of basketry by collaborating with potter and sculptor Astrid Kruse on a large number of pieces that meshed ceramics and basket-weaving.

"We broke the rules in the other's medium," she said.

Harper's collection now includes sculptural artwork in a variety of media, traditional baskets in willow and commercial reed as well as woven i-Pod cases, necklace purses and small jewelry boxes. She has shown work through the Open Sky Festival in Fort Simpson and has art at Down to Earth Gallery in Old Town.

Whenever she encounters another artist's basket in a gallery or store she examines the weave and how it is constructed, forever problem solving and exploring new ideas for her own work, she said.

"They have yet to find a machine that can make baskets," she said, adding that even the baskets in large department stores were made somewhere by someone's own hands. "A lot of people don't recognize the work that goes into making fine traditional crafts."

Harper has taken workshops in the U.S. and in Western Canada to build her repertoire of skills, as well.

She will lead workshops in Yellowknife from January through May of 2009.

"Every time I teach I learn something new from my students, as well," she said.