The basket-making process was divided into several stages, each involving craftspeople specialized in their trade. Sourcing raw materials, their initial processing, spinning and dyeing the yarns, weaving the cane structure, and creating the decoration were just some of these steps. Templates, which were samples of the artisan’s technological and iconographic proficiency, were helpful in planning the layout and organizing the colors.
The artifacts made of leather and cane presented at the exhibition illustrate the method of creating miniature walls. The first step involved painting the planned decorative motif on the leather. Then, with shallow cuts made by a stone blade, a precise arrangement of vertical and horizontal lines forming an even grid was developed. The width of one module would correspond to the width of a cane splint. Dividing the composition into square units made it easier to transfer and scale the colored fields onto the template walls.
The fuction of the parchment influenced the geometric nature of the painted decoration and the tendency towards stylistic simplifications. The center of the composition features an anthropomorphic figure dressed in a serpent belt and crescent-shaped headdress, holding a goblet in one hand and an atlatl, spear thrower, in the other. To replicate the drawing on the cane templates, the artist had to use new artistic means. So flat colored areas were replaced with tridimensional wool yarns, and the thick black contour enclosing the colored fields was substituted with black resin-coated cotton cord. The structure of the miniature walls and the technique of creating decoration using square units caused the curved lines that made up the elements of the painted composition to deform into regularly broken lines on the cane, thereby creating a stepped effect. For this reason, it seems that the artist deliberately chose not to copy Lima bean seeds, that enclose the main representation. Their rounded forms would have been too distorted on the square grid of the miniature templates.
Emanuela Rudnicka