PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN BACK
Ryan Back is a maker. Hobby woodworking, full-time portrait photography, spoon-making—you name it. These days, he’s found a new focus: baskets.
Back, who lives in Northside, makes a living selling his woven baskets on his website, doublemountainspoonco.com, and teaching workshops. The baskets are durable and sturdy, often made of reeds or tree bark. He hand-carves wooden handles and uses good leather for straps.
“I can do the whole thing in one day,” Back says. “The leatherwork takes me a lot longer.” Larger baskets take less time; smaller, sculptural baskets woven with finer materials take longer. “It’s like knitting with super chunky wool versus knitting with silk.”
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN BACK
Back found his way to this craft through woodworking—more specifically, green woodworking, which uses freshly cut green logs instead of kiln-dried, commercially available lumber. While making his wooden spoons, he used a knife and an axe, which resulted in a few late-night ER visits.
Back taught himself the craft using YouTube, but his basket technique is inspired by Native American and Shaker traditions. One of his popular styles is a backpack basket. These baskets are less than 2 feet deep and sturdy, with a strong front, a round top, and a flat back, to sit against the wearer’s back. The design, Back says, is based on an Indigenous design and meant to fit in canoes.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN BACK
Back enjoys playing with tension and compression—how tightly the basket material is woven. “As a maker, I almost always feel a lot of sympathy for the forms and vessels I’m creating,” he says. “What holds a basket together, for example, is the basket trying to come apart; I find that beautiful and relatable.” To him, it’s not unlike photographing people, “except I’m not limited to capturing a literal likeness.”
He worked on his technique for two years, making traditional and experimental baskets and woven forms as a full-time art practice. In 2022, the National Basketry Organization awarded him a scholarship to provide study time and send him to a basketry conference in Tacoma, Washington. As of December 2023, he’s been applying to artist residencies to further explore the craft of basketmaking.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN BACK
“It’s not wasteful. It makes use of locally available materials. It is not exploitative or harmful,” he says. “That’s very important to me.”
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