Basketry: Making Human Nature’, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts 8 February – 22 May 2011 Penny Sparke

The ‘Basketry: Making Human Nature’ exhibition, held at the University of East Anglia’s Sainsbury Centre between February and May 2011, was the output of a three-year research project that formed part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded ‘Beyond Text: Performances, Sounds, Images, Objects’ programme, the aim of which was to generate new understandings of, and research into, the impact and significance of the way we communicate. Inasmuch as the exhibition focused on the strong visual, material and symbolic power of artefacts to communicate a wide range of human activities, beliefs, aspirations and emotions, all of which speak for themselves on their own terms without the need to justify themselves through the use of either the written or the spoken word, it ably fulfilled the programme’s brief. It went far beyond that as well, however, offering an unprecedented insight into what has, as a result of its links with the pre-industrial, the handmade, the domestic and the aesthetically marginal, been dubbed, a ‘Cinderella subject’. When focused upon in as concentrated and as intense a way as ‘she’ was in this exhibit, however, it was clear ‘Cinderella’ had finally donned her golden gown and gone to the ball.