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wall pocket
wall pocket
wall pocket
A birch bark wall pocket decorated with porcupine quillwork. Anishinaabeg, probably from Manitoulin. Collected by Father Edward Purbrick in 1879 and donated to Stonyhurst College. One of several items purchased by the British Museum from Stonyhurst College in 2003.
Manufacture techniques and style.
Created with information from the British Museum accession record and observations made by the GRASAC research team.
Read More About This Relative
Made of birch bark, light lavender cotton tape, blue silk, black cylindrical and seed beads, and porcupine quills, natural and dyed yellow, magenta, and light green. Aniline dyes were used to colour the porcupine quills.
Two pieces of birch bark, one lozenge-shaped and the other heart-shaped, are bound with light lavender cotton tape. The blue silk sides of the pocket are decorated with a looped string of black cylindrical and round seed beads. Floral motifs in porcupine quillwork decorate both the pocket and the space above.
Decorated with floral motifs. The pocket is heart-shaped.
This item is an example of Anishinaabeg artists' desires to push the limits of their medium and create items of a hybrid genre which were enthusiastically received by Victorian tourists. See Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), 182-3.
Ruth Phillips said the wall pocket and quillwork may have been done by different artists.
British Museum accession record. Father Edward Purbrick acquired this item, along with other similarly-quilled birch bark pieces, while on a tour of inspection of Canadian Jesuit missions in the Central and Eastern Great Lakes region.
Provenance
Collected by Father Edward Purbrick in 1879 and subsequently donated to Stonyhurst College, a Jesuit school in Lancashire. The Stonyhurst Collection was purchased by the British Museum in 2003.
A description of Father Edward Purbrick's collection and a discussion on the decorative styles of many of the birch bark items is found in Ruth Phillips, Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), 182-3.
About This GRASAC Record
Unknown Anishinaabeg artist, wall pocket. Currently in the British Museum, Am2003,19.50. Item photographed and described as part of a GRASAC research trip December 2007; GRASAC item id 27279.
This record was created as part of a Great Lakes Research Alliance for the Study of Aboriginal Arts and Cultures (GRASAC) research trip to the Pitt Rivers Museum and British Museum, December 8-22 2007, funded by a grant from the International Opportunities fund of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).
Researchers present: Heidi Bohaker (HB), John Borrows (JB), Lindsay Borrows (LB), Darlene Johnston (DJ), Stacey Loyer (SL), Janis Monture (JM), Bruce Morito (BM), Ruth Phillips (RP), Cory Willmott (CW).