Elwood Donnelly on Patience, Pattern, and the Work of Hands

Elwood Donnelly performing with Atwater-Donnelly, the wife-husband duo he's toured with for 38 years

SNEAK PEEK VERSION

Elwood Donnelly on Patience, Pattern, and the Work of Hands

Elwood Donnelly's basement studio in Warren smells of laundry soap, heating oil, and reed.

Windows high on the foundation let in light—cats prowling the side yard, insects at the glass. Sometimes his wife Aubrey practices clog dancing upstairs. Sometimes he weaves to music. Most times, silence.

4 rows weaved

"The world outside me does disappear when I go down to weave," he tells me. "I find it contemplative."

Donnelly didn't start weaving until 1998, when his wife was teaching at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. He took a basket-making class to fill the week. Within two years, he'd found two mentors—master weavers Mary St. Pierre and Mary Carty—bought materials, brought the craft home.

"I can't say weaving has changed what I value," he says, "but it sure corroborates what I value: love of art, quietness, working with my hands, creating something beautiful from raw materials."

Elwood's hand-crafted basket

For nearly 40 years, Donnelly has made his living as a folk musician, touring 38 states with his wife, Aubrey Atwood. Fourteen recordings. Eight books. International airplay. But basketweaving—that's different. That's the space between performances, the empty hours filled with reed and pattern and the slow accumulation of something made to last.

"I want to believe that people who buy my baskets are proud of themselves for buying something made by hand," he says. "Many are creative in their own ways, or so busy with life—bringing up families, working, making ends meet—that they look and hope for the day when they too have the space for creative pastimes."

Elwood's basket, right before rim is added

What does Rhode Island give to your craft that nowhere else could?

"I was born and raised here. I have a strong sense of place. Even though I've traveled all over, returning home has always been important to me—a magnetic pull to come back to my roots, to a place where I feel loved and comforted, where people appreciate the small things I can offer with my music and basket weaving. I suppose I could thrive somewhere else.

But here, in Rhode Island, I am content."

Read the full interview in Issue No. 1, available March 21st.

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