Holding Space

Drawing on Irish traditions, Port Townsend, Washington–based artist Maureen Walrath weaves local willow into baskets that help usher souls into the next world.

By Kimberly Coburn
November 11, 2024

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Photo by Maureen Walrath

Walrath wove this vessel for Laurence, a living elder, “to hold him when death inevitably comes.” The coffin’s willow was grown, tended, and harvested by hand in Chimacum, Washington. The “spine” of the lid is an old cedar fence board and the handles are made of rope.

The gray sea light of Port Townsend, Washington, washes through the window of Maureen Walrath’s barn loft studio. Goats and chickens squabble below. Bundles of cured willow hang along the slanted eaves in shades ranging from butter to molasses, the possibility of a hundred baskets held within them.

On a long wooden table in the middle of the room, a willow coffin grows row by woven row. Walrath’s hands move in a steady rhythm set by the low tune she hums. The otherworldly light casts shadows that pool in the emerging spaces, in the ridges between the willow rounds, in the coffin’s long mouth. The shadows ask of everything they touch: what can you hold? Walrath herself carries the swimming promise of her unborn child. She reaches out to weave over her growing belly.

A gentle inquiry into the art of holding is at the heart of Walrath’s craft. “I love considering the whole picture when I’m making these vessels, of how they’re going to hold someone,” she reflects. “Both how they’re going to hold the one inside and also how they’re going to hold the space for those who surround the basket.”

Originally from Chicago, Walrath worked in arts education until a pull to live closer to the land led her to a series of intentional communities in Missouri. There, inspiration tugged at her sleeve again. “I came to baskets very intuitively,” she recounts. “It was a very spontaneous messenger that just said ‘baskets.’”

A friend connected her with Oregon-based ethnobotanist and basketmaker Margaret Mathewson, but Mathewson wasn’t taking on apprentices at the time. She did, however, offer Walrath another option. “She told me, ‘Well, you could just get on a train and come out here. Bring a sleeping bag and a knife.’ That’s where my relationship with willow started, where the willow rhythm entered my life.”

Walrath’s days continue to move at a pace set by willow. “It has become a part of who I am. Not necessarily as an identity, but as part of my seasonal and yearly rhythm.”

Alongside her creative practice, Walrath has guided members of her community through their most intimate transitions as both a birth and a death doula. These liminal landscapes inform her work. “Ancestral crafts like basketry have a way of being a part of everyday humanness, of living with human culture,” she says. “There’s a natural, organic connection with birth and death work. The practice has within it this ancient tendril: we’ve always been weaving baskets, we’ve always been tending to birth and showing up at the threshold of death.”

Photo courtesy of Jodie Buller

Walrath harvests willow in November, the dormant season, in Salem, Oregon.

“Ancestral crafts like basketry have a way of being a part of everyday humanness, of living with human culture. There’s a natural, organic connection with birth and death work.”

— Maureen Walrath

Walrath wove her first coffin while visiting the western coast of Ireland, her family’s ancestral home. On that trip, she received news of her grandmother’s passing. Standing at the sea’s edge, watching boats sail toward the horizon, she caught the glimmer of an insight. “That was the beginning of my understanding of baskets as spirit vessels.”

Walrath incorporated cradles and coffins into her practice: baskets to welcome spirits into this world and to usher them gently from it. Though she has woven fewer cradles since having her own children, she has deepened her work in coffin weaving. She shares her expertise not only in basketry but also in navigating the logistics of “green” or “conservation burials,” an increasingly popular option in death care.

Walrath partners with a local orchard and cidery to grow over 40 varieties of basketry willow. It takes about three years of growth for a willow variety to show its full expression. “Willow is a shapeshifter,” Walrath says, explaining how the plants swap genes to form new varieties. “In the wild, willow very, very readily crosses. The soil, the water, the sunlight—the whole ecological web affects what the willow looks like and feels like, how it grows.”

Collecting material for willow basketry demands forethought, especially for projects as large as coffins, which require more than 700 sticks ranging from 5 to 9 feet in length. “You have to think two years in advance,” Walrath explains. Once the willow drops its leaves in autumn, Walrath coppices it, cutting it back to the ground. After harvesting, she sorts the sticks by size and bundles them to cure for a year. Walrath then soaks the cured willow in a stock

tank for anywhere from 7 to 20 days and then “mellows” it, wrapped in a tarp, for another 3 to 7 days. Then the willow is pliable enough to work with and weaving can begin.
In her online course “How I Hold You,” offered in partnership with the largely virtual Coyote Willow School House, Walrath walks participants through the process of creating both a coffin and an open willow tray she calls a “Soul Boat.” She guides students through five phases of construction: building a sturdy wooden frame as the bones of the base, weaving the base from the head and foot toward the center, inserting uprights and building up the walls of the coffin, repeating the steps of the base to create a lid, and finally adding cordage, toggles, and handles.

Photo by Maureen Walrath

The soul boat for a man named Emerson was adorned with flowers and ritual objects just before his burial at White Eagle Memorial Preserve, a conservation burial ground in southeastern Washington.

Photo by Michael Swierz

Walrath tends this willow—which grows in Washington next to Chimacum Creek on the traditional lands of the Chimakum (Aqokύlo) people—and uses it in her work.
Photo by Maureen Walrath

Soul boats like this one, 6 ft. long x 22 in. wide, are made to hold shrouded bodies for burial or be used ceremonially before natural organic reduction or body composting.

“Weaving opens a portal to be with the unknown, the liminal, the shimmering in-between.”

— Maureen Walrath

The process is deeply meditative and fundamentally embodied. Though Walrath relies on a handful of tools—pruning shears, a knife, a basket awl or bodkin for opening spaces, and a rapping iron to pack the willow evenly—her most reliable instrument is her own body, even for measurement: a forearm’s span for the length of a cut, the breadth of three fingers between uprights, a wingspan (plus a bit) of rope for the handles. From design to decomposition, these baskets reflect an intimate collaboration between willow and the human form.

The willow coffin’s capacity for holding extends beyond ferrying the body of the beloved. Walrath finds that the process of building coffins offers the weaver solace and creates a tangible place for her grief. “Weaving opens a portal to be with the unknown,” she says, “the liminal, the shimmering in-between.”

It invites us to sit with the fruitful questions that rarely make their way into polite conversation. “How can calling closer the ways we want to be held in dying and in death bring so many tender gifts to the way we are held in life?” Walrath asks. “Willow,” she adds, “is an incredible companion to walk alongside death with.”

woventhresholds.com | @woventhresholds
coyotewillowschoolhouse.com | @coyotewillowschoolhouse

Kimberly Coburn is an Atlanta-based writer and maker whose work explores the intersection between craft, the human spirit, and the natural world.

Photo by Marit Olivia

The hands of many beloveds rest on the lid of a woven coffin “in a moment of farewell, reverence, and togetherness.”

Photo by Marit Olivia

Walrath weaves a coffin for a local couple still living.
Photo by Maureen Walrath

To finish the base for a coffin, Walrath weaves the willow around slats of wood.

Photo by Maureen Walrath

The hands of many beloveds rest on the lid of a woven coffin “in a moment of farewell, reverence, and togetherness.”

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