Travel

Materials + Processes

Learning from Makers

Vacation With an Artist gives ordinary travelers a chance to learn from extraordinary artists—right in their studios.

By Courtney Helgoe
September 5, 2024

Fall 2024

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Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Through Vacation With an Artist, apprentices can learn craft skills from accomplished makers such as Loretta Pettway Bennett.

On the final day of her vacation to Ubud, Indonesia, designer Geetika Agrawal spent the afternoon in a silversmith’s studio. She had only a few hours, but it was long enough to learn to craft her own silver ring. On her way back to New York, Agrawal wondered how much more she could have learned if she’d spent her entire vacation in that studio.

“I’ve always seen the act of making as a way to discover yourself, but also as a way to discover the world,” she says. “Traveling puts you in a new frame of mind, and if you’re able to spend that time creating, it’s very powerful.”

A few years later, Agrawal founded her own program to connect travelers with master artisans for “mini-apprenticeships”: Vacation With an Artist (VAWAA). Agrawal had discovered her love of apprenticing during her college days in India, where she spent summers working with local artisans in Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu. Later, attending graduate school for design in the US, she embraced the Bauhaus school’s egalitarian principles, which hold that beauty and design are for everyone, not just artists and patrons. These values are the “real seed” of VAWAA, says Agrawal.

“Society is going through a soul crisis,” she notes. “Deep inside our souls we are not feeling alive.” She believes craft making can be an antidote to this soul sickness. “I find making and doing so nourishing, so inspiring. It can be a spiritual practice to focus on just one thing.”

As she built VAWAA, starting in 2015, Agrawal searched for skilled artisans who shared her values of preserving craft and culture, and who enjoyed sharing their knowledge with others. The program now coordinates visits with more than 150 artists. Their practices range from handweaving and stone carving to bookbinding and puppet making. Visits include private instruction, materials, and studio time—and often local sightseeing. Visitors leave with a finished work of craft and, importantly, the knowledge required to make it again.

Here’s what three VAWAA participants made of their opportunities—and how artists benefit beyond an additional income stream.

vawaa.com | @vawaa_

Weaving Kudzu and Longleaf Pine Needles

Fiber artist Terry Lee lives in the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, and she’s spent most of her life in the company of skilled makers. “Growing up around women who did handwork and made many of the clothes I wore has no doubt been part of my drive to learn all hand skills,” she says. “Especially to make necessary items the way we did prior to industrialization.”

Now a master quilter and silk painter, several of Lee’s pieces have been shown in galleries as well as the National Quilt Museum in Paducah, Kentucky. She says she’s been hooked on fiber arts since her first batik experience in middle school and had long been curious about basket weaving.

With some vacation time from her government job approaching, a search led Lee to VAWAA. There she found the listing for learning Indigenous basketry and pine needle fiber arts from Nancy Basket in Walhalla, South Carolina. A descendant of Margaret Basket, a Cherokee woman who lived in Virginia in the mid-1800s, Basket has been telling stories at powwows and teaching basket making for over 30 years. She received the South Carolina Jean Laney Harris Folk Heritage Award for basketry in 2005.

Lee sensed a kindred spirit and someone who shared her pragmatic values. “Nancy was far more than a basket-weaving instructor; she was an elder, a weaver of baskets and fabric, a papermaker and environmentally conscious artist,” she recalls. “If that wasn’t amazing enough, she was doing all of this with kudzu, a plant that anyone in the southeastern part of the United States considers an invasive and unrelenting pest.”

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Nancy Basket welcomes apprentices at her barn, built from bales of kudzu.

Lee contacted VAWAA to ask if she could arrange a weeklong trip to learn all three crafts: basket weaving, papermaking, and fabric making. Basket agreed, and VAWAA arranged a custom experience just for Lee and her best friend, Phoebe Sophocles.

“We worked with many different fibers, all sourced right on Nancy’s property,” Lee remembers. Their main fiber was kudzu, but they also collected wild honeysuckle, wisteria, and wild olive for ribbed baskets, as well as longleaf pine needles for coiled baskets. Basket encouraged experimentation and never failed to impart a spirit of play. “The kudzu fermenting and papermaking processes were messy and a little smelly but amounted to the same fun as making mud pies when you were a kid,” Lee says.

Basket directed the women to treasures tucked into the surrounding mountains that they could visit during nonclass hours, and there were delicious lunches prepared by Basket’s daughter and eaten alongside Basket’s mother. The three generations of women laughed and shared stories.

By week’s end, Lee and Sophocles had made three types of baskets, woven a square of fabric from the silky inner fibers of the kudzu vines, and produced a big stack of assorted papers. Lee also left with a new perspective. “Nancy’s teachings led to a very different way of looking at all that is around me,” she says. “I was surprised to learn how much is right outside of my door . . . plants I have looked at each day without realizing how truly useful all of it can be.”

For Basket, working with VAWAA allows her to share her culture with people worldwide. “A greater connection to nature and ‘All That Is,’ through harvesting what some call weeds, changes us as beings,” she says. “Fiber arts of basketry, papermaking, and cloth weaving from kudzu and other pervasive vines are medicine for the people when combined with ancient Indigenous stories.”

nancybasket.com | @nancy.basket

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Nancy Basket’s pine needle baskets, some of which include Catawba clay centers, Tenerife pottery centers, or lids made with found turtle shells.

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Basket reveals persimmons on a tree recently cleared of kudzu.
Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Basket shows how to make a ribbed basket from kudzu, wisteria, Cherokee sweet shrub, autumn olive, and other vines from her yard.

“Nancy was far more than a basket-weaving instructor; she was an elder . . . ”

— Terry Lee

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

While kudzu paper dries on a clothesline, water drips onto a plastic sheet and then into an ice cream bucket that’s emptied outside on willow withies. “Water is honored here,” Basket says.
Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Sophocles (left) concentrates on learning a basketry technique while Basket watches, waiting to help if needed.

Handcrafting Incense and Perfumes

After Shirley Hendrickson had her first child during the pandemic, her attention turned inward. She had been a hustling creative in a corporate setting in Seattle; now she was a stay-at-home parent in an uncertain world. “This was a deeply introspective time for me,” she recalls. “And it really called me back to doing something with my hands.”

Hendrickson’s husband saw she was struggling. Knowing his wife’s interest in natural scents, he booked her a VAWAA experience with Persephenie Lea, a maker of natural incense and perfumes who lives in Los Angeles.

A health crisis a few years prior had led Hendrickson to learn about the potential harms of synthetic fragrance, so she was already making her own skincare products. Her yoga and meditation practices had attuned her to the power of incense. Still, she says, when it came to the art of scent making, “the door really opened when I got to study with Persephenie.”

“Crafting scents can feel deeply moving for guests. One’s olfactory sense is personal and intimate,” says Lea, who teaches the materials, techniques, and history of incense and perfume craft and appreciates the human connection that’s created during VAWAA workshops. “Scent and working with plants to make incense is a portal, a very unique realm. More always comes alive—inspiration, spirit, connection, and possibilities.”

Throughout the visit, Lea shared stories, such as how Japanese incense masters created “incense clocks,” with different scents indicating different times of day. “She is trying to keep this art form alive,” Hendrickson notes. “That’s what VAWAA is all about, keeping these rituals and forms alive.”

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Persephenie Lea (left) working with another VAWAA participant.

“I learned more in four days than in my entire college career. ”

— Shirley Hendrickson

Lea showed Hendrickson how the perfume-making process is “like writing a song but in scent.” A perfume is a chord, with a top note, middle note, and bass note. A captivating fragrance creates an original harmony between them. “I left with the scent that my husband and I now wear every day,” Hendrickson says, a custom blend that contains pink pepper, yuzu, and frankincense.

This is not all she took home. Hendrickson departed with a wealth of knowledge—“I learned more in four days than in my entire college career,” she says—as well as renewed confidence in her creative abilities. She and Lea now text routinely as she builds her own perfume and incense business in Ghana, where her family relocated to start a creative venture.

“I had always dreamed of being an artist,” Hendrickson says. “Sometimes it takes meeting someone to see that it’s possible.”

persephenie.com | @persephenie_studio

Photo by Persephenie Lea, courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Hendrickson learned different approaches to crafting incense while working with Lea. She also made perfumes in multiple forms: solids, oils, and grain spirits.

Photo by Persephenie Lea, courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Shirley Hendrickson gathers plant materials during her VAWAA apprenticeship.

Photo by Persephenie Lea, courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Shirley Hendrickson squeezes excess water out of organic matter used to make rose beads.

Photo by Persephenie Lea, courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Shirley Hendrickson measures essential oils and absolutes to create her personal perfume.

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Quilting with Friends and Family

The generations of women who create the bold geometric quilts in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, are indisputable masters of American quilting. Yet even someone with no experience is welcome to learn from third-generation quilters Loretta Pettway Bennett and Marlene Bennett Jones.

“I had only sewn with a needle and thread in elementary school,” says Halcyon Person, a children’s television writer from Brooklyn. Yet the moment she arrived in Gee’s Bend with her mother, Nicole Fabricand-Person, an art historian and Japanese art specialist in the rare book collection at Princeton University, they felt welcome. Pettway Bennett greeted them with a toolbox and informed them of their first task: fixing the town’s sign.

“It felt immediately like we were part of a team,” Person remembers. “That’s a generosity I didn’t expect.”

According to her daughter, Fabricand-Person has a natural aptitude for craft and can pick up just about any practice. She had done other VAWAA apprenticeships online during the pandemic, so Person surprised her at Christmas with a mother-daughter trip to Gee’s Bend. “It was on my bucket list to learn quilting from these incredible artists,” Fabricand-Person says.

They spent four days in Gee’s Bend. The first and most of the second were devoted to choosing materials. These included new fabric, clothes from local thrift stores, and fabric recycled from Pettway Bennett’s and Bennett Jones’s own collections. All of those disparate materials came together in the final design.

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Pettway Bennett lays out a quilt.

“It was on my bucket list to learn quilting from these incredible artists.”

— Nicole Fabricand-Person

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Halcyon Person (left) learns quilting skills from Loretta Pettway Bennett (middle) and Marlene Bennett Jones (right).
Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

After finishing their quilt, Person (left) and Fabricand-Person made small quilt blocks to incorporate into future projects.

“Marlene is a master of color theory,” says Person. “She would explain how different fabrics interact, what happens when a third is added, how you can create busyness, calm, complication, just through color.”

Person and her mother then spent plenty of time sewing (or in Person’s case, learning to sew) as well as being driven around Gee’s Bend by Pettway Bennett, meeting neighbors and hearing stories. They also explored historic sites in Montgomery and Selma, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge. These visits were deeply meaningful for them. Being in Alabama allowed Person—whose father’s family has roots next door, in Georgia—to connect to her heritage in a new way.

“My family was part of the Great Migration north, and it felt good to spend time in a community that reminds me of my family,” says Person, whose great-grandmother was a quilter. “I got to see so many parallels, talking with Loretta and Marlene about the traditions they’ve kept.”

The mother-daughter duo left Gee’s Bend with a finished quilt that is now a family heirloom. And through VAWAA they brought home lasting friendships.

“Most of the participants become like forever friends because we become connected to one another like thread and fabric when sewn together,” says Pettway Bennett. Bennett Jones adds that meeting VAWAA participants is like “traveling all around the world without leaving Gee’s Bend. I get to learn about their families, cultures, and traditions like they are learning about mine.”

Fabricand-Person, who texts pictures of her projects to Pettway Bennett and Bennett Jones, says, “I’m now in love with making quilts, even as I’m very slow. I have nothing but praise for VAWAA, the way you look at the world differently after these trips. The experience changed me.”

@geesbendquiltmakers

Courtney Helgoe is a writer, editor, and art lover who lives in Minneapolis.

Photo courtesy of Vacation With an Artist

Halcyon Person and her mother Nicole Fabricand-Person created this quilt with Loretta Pettway Bennett and Marlene Bennett Jones during their VAWAA apprenticeship in Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

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