Lanark Highlands Basketry Museum moving to Middleville Museum
Ankaret Dean did something when she was a 40 year-old mother of four and living in Oakville, that has had major implications in her life generally, and led indirectly to the Basketry Express magazine that she founded, the basketry museum the she established, and the development of the McDonalds Corners Elphin Recreation Centre (MERA).
She applied to go back to school.
The Sheridan College School of Design was new, and looking for people to populate its crafts department.
Ankaret recalls going to an interview.
“I went over and talked to the person in charge, and I had an interview. I asked him if I was too old, and he said no, so I signed up and went there, and I had three years of learning everything.”
At Sheridan, Ankaret spent a semester in each of the different studios, including ceramics, wood, metal, and textiles.
She recalls having to throw pots, make a metal change, learn how to draft, and how to build.
When she got to the textile studio, she was told she, “had to make a three dimensional object. I had a governess when I was ten, and I remember she taught me to make a basket. So, for Sheridan, I picked some weeping willow, and made a willow basket. No one in my class had ever made a basket before, and they were amazed and encouraged me. I would never have thought about it otherwise."
Not only did her time at Sheridan spark her interest in baskets, which has never left her, it also led to a career in craft journalism.
She was too busy with family and other interests to finish up her courses at Sheridan, but she made a lot of contacts in the world of fine crafts and joined the Ontario Crafts Council. One day she was at the council office, when an editor from the Toronto Star showed up, looking for a writer for a page that was to include a crafts column. The Star was willing to pay $100 per article. Ankaret wrote a sample article and was hired. She remained at the Star for years, until the editor retired and the page was replaced with a lifestyle page.
“I fell into rather a good job, I could go off and interview people about what they were making and how it was made, what their craft was all about. And took a lot of photographs, luckily I had learned photography.”
That experience exposed her to the craft world in a different way, and she developed contacts she would draw on, later on.
At the same time, an interest in basketry kept surfacing. She picked up different kinds of baskets on her travels, learned how to make baskets from basket makers from different cultures, and kept making baskets.
One of Ankaret and her husband John's daughters moved to a farm in Lanark Highlands near McDonalds Corners, and always wanting to live in the country, Ankaret and John bought a farm nearby and moved there in the 1990s.
The schoolhouse in McDonalds Corners had been decommissioned and was the property of the local township, which became Lanark Highlands after municipal amalgamation in 1998.
Ankaret was at a public meeting at the schoolhouse to talk about what to do with the building, and she suggested it could become an arts centre, and she could help acquire grants to make that happen. A group was formed, and having obtained arts council grants in the past, Ankaret took the lead in the grant writing, and managed to secure $22,000 from the Ontario Arts Council for renovations, and the membership-based McDonalds Corners Elphin Recreation/Arts (MERA) Centre was born.
A number of textile and basketry projects, all spearheaded by Ankaret, have taken place at MERA over the years. These include a Living Willow Labyrinth, a coracle regatta and catapult event on Dalhousie Lake, and much more.
Ankaret's abiding interest in baskets also led her to start up a magazine/newsletter, the Basketry Express, which she published quarterly for decades. Before and since the establishment of the museum, she has presented and hosted dozens of workshops covering a wide variety of basketry styles and techniques.
In 2016, she catalogued her collection of baskets and made them available to the public on her property, and the Lanark Highlands Basketry Museum was established. Among the 400 baskets in the museum, many were either made or gathered by Ankaret, or given to her by her friend, Jule Koch, who was a basket maker and collaborator with Ankaret with the basketry express (and owner and managing editor of the Frontenac News).
The museum has sponsored exhibits and workshops over the last ten years.
Ankaret, now in her 90s, decided it was time to move from her farm to a place in Perth, and fortunately the Middleville museum has agreed to take ownership of the Basketry Museum and the extensive website Ankaret has developed to support it, and has incorporated the museum's contents into its permanent collection.
The official handover of the museum will take place on June 28, in conjunction with a Strawberry Tea at the Middleville Museum.
A series of workshops have been set up for this summer, to mark the 10th anniversary of the museum and its move to Middleville. See below for details.
