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life. Laky’s resulting basket wields plastic’s magical
ability to hold vivid color, transparency, flexibility
and solidity all at once. At the same time, Graceful
Exit perfectly distills the inescapable as plastic con-
tinues to crowd the earth.
As artists who work in fiber already know, nature
can teach us. Jute, the strong and unassuming
fiber produced from the stalk of the Corcho-
rus plant, has been in use since the third millenni-
um, B.C. It has also been the province of modern
fiber artists since the pioneering work of Mag-
dalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017) and Claire
Zeisler (1903–1991) who each relied on its pos-
sibilities for massive scale and form. In the hands
of Naoko Serino, this so called ‘golden fiber’
takes on remarkable organicism and lightness.
Serino, who graduated in 1984 from Kyushu
Sangyo University in Japan, had been working
long before biologist Janine Benyus coined the
term biomimicry in the late 1990s—the practice
of looking to nature for design solutions. How-
ever, Serino naturally exemplifies these ideas in
her work.3 Pieces like Rooted 6, 2025 (pp. 100-
101) offer a clear example. To create it, Serino
pressed various densities of spun jute around a
mold, claiming fiber’s ability to hold structure in
a near-weightless form—not by looking to the
strict geometry of human-designed architecture,
but instead by mimicking the meshed root sys-
tem plants have honed over millennia. The result-
ing work suggests leaf-like tendrils, or a cascade
of flowers mid-bloom.
Nature’s poetics inform other artists. Nancy Koe-
nigsberg’s seemingly unending webbed frame-
work of blue, green, and black wires signals the
vast interconnection of tides, currents, and life
under water in Ocean, 2025 (p. 50-51). Unlike
the vivid colors Mary Merkel-Hess often uses in
her reed and paper cord vessels, Ember’s, 2025
(pp. 66-67) smoke-black and verdigris hues me-
morialize fires that have increasingly raged across
our continent. By contrast, Polly Barton’s woven
pink and gold-leaf Salvia Sclarea (Clary Sage),
2025 (p. 20-21) suggests a botanical remedy to
today’s anxious climate.
But what of the concept of beauty beyond na-
ture? It could be said that you know it when
you see it, but since the days of Plato and Aris-
totle there have been few knottier notions than
beauty. All eras and cultures have negotiated
the concept—some subjective, some objective,
and for others, an embodied experience.4 The
Western 20th century view has often not looked