Touchmarks: The Social Life of Plastic Baskets is a cultural and artistic investigation of a transnational object: the plastic basket. The ‘social life’, introduced by Arjun Appadurai, articulates the shifts in meaning, form, function, and use activated by an objects exchange. This work presents invented objects, cast and fabricated in pewter from plastic baskets fragments, in an attempt to capture the quotidian existence of plastic baskets’ use, prevalence and exchange. Imagining a ‘social life’ for these newly invented forms led me to emphasize formal gestures of the objects, expose marks from the making, and recontextualize the ‘touchmarks’ of the plastic baskets’ point of origin (place of production, company, coding) within each of the analogous works.

The transformation of the woven pattern, third generation to its handicraft source, wicker to plastic to pewter, obscures the object’s source. Woven basket? Woven tapestry? Plastic chair? Why is the woven pattern still applied to mass-produced goods even though modes of production have long displaced the weaving process that designated its original marks? Is it an attempt to visually humanize what is otherwise labeled as generic production code (No 901) or reduced to a vast country (Made in India, Made in China)? Or does the plastic woven pattern, as simulacra to the handicraft of basketry, evoke a longing for that which the hand once crafted?

This series presents a re-evaluation of one’s relationship with familiar and distant objects, providing a context for the distance between producer and consumer to be recognized and considered.