The Individual Talent

Brilliant paper baskets are former IT executive’s take on tradition 

When Asheville artist Robin Daugherty left for Europe some years ago, it seemed that a second career in the arts would have to wait. She’d been working in information technology at the University of Maryland but interrupted her night studies in the arts to take an IT position at Munich’s Technical University. 

But the four years she spent in Munich exposed her to that city’s vibrant arts community, especially the work of the environmental artist and activist Friedrich Stowasser (1928 – 2000), who, using the arts pseudonym Hundertwasser, was known for his use of brilliant colors and patterns.

The experience came to full flower years later when Daugherty, who had returned to  Asheville to work at UNCA, retired in 2011 after 28 years as the school’s director of administrative systems.

“My retirement gift to myself was a course at Penland School of Craft,” Daugherty says, “and I feel that inspired me to my current path.” That path has led to Daugherty’s signature, highly colored and patterned paper baskets, an appealing combination of a traditional craft with a contemporary aesthetic flair. She first learned weaving as part of a group of women who invited such well-known heritage makers as the late basketmaker Billie Ruth Sudduth to help them refine their skills.

However, basketmaking’s time-honored material, natural reed, didn’t suit her. “I was getting tired of using it,” remembers Daugherty, citing the uneven quality of available reed and the “unsatisfactory” dyeing process. Then, during a visit to the Asheville craft-supply store Earth Guild, Daugherty was captivated by a collection of painted paper baskets, learned how to make them, and began applying her own eye for unusual color and shape.

The baskets have proven so popular that Daugherty will be a visiting artist at this spring’s Art Safari, a self-guided studio tour in Weaverville.

Daugherty paints with acrylic on both sides of archival-quality 140-pound cotton-rag watercolor paper, and then cuts the paper into long strips. She weaves using the same techniques she learned with reed, except there’s no mold, so each of her baskets ends up a slightly different shape and dimension. The rims are decorated paper or birch wood strips, sewn to the basket with waxed linen thread. She varies the technique by sometimes leaving the outside surface unpainted and instead covering it with a collaged skin of thin natural fiber paper, applying her own monoprints or color to the surface.

While the baskets have become her best-known work, Daugherty has also produced two-dimensional abstract work on canvas, some of it created during the pandemic’s isolation period. “I still do quite a bit of that for my own pleasure,” Daugherty says. Lately, she’s been exploring a new and unusual medium: pizza boxes. “I have a large stack of cardboard waiting,” she says. “I did a really nice assemblage but accidentally left it in the rain, and it actually came out fairly well. So there is hope.”

Robin Daugherty will exhibit her work during the Weaverville Art Safari Spring Studio Tour— happening 10am-5pm Saturday, April 29 and Sunday, April 30 — as a guest of painter Liz Hosier at 416 Kyfields. www.weavervilleartsafari.com. Daugherty’s baskets are sold in Asheville at ArtPlay Studio, 372 Depot St. Suite 44, artplay-studio.com.