Shannon Lucas Westrum, 2025 McKnight Fiber Artist Fellow

Shannon Lucas Westrum’s love of texture and fibers began in childhood, when she convinced an elderly neighbor to teach her to crochet. She spent countless hours creating with yarn, wood, beads, paper, and leather—weaving materials and techniques together and continually exploring. In her early twenties, she began serious practice as a basket maker through community education programs and fiber arts guilds. When Westrum became a mother, she divided her time between work and raising her daughters, and her art took an intermission. Five years later, her young daughter looked up at her and doubted her claim to have made the basket in her hands—having never seen her create anything in her entire life. That moment inspired her to re-embrace her artistic self, not only for her own sake but so her daughters could understand what could be made with their hands together.
Westrum returned to weaving at home, developing her own style and seeking opportunities to learn wherever she could find them. Her work grew into a blend of cultures, traditions, and technical skills. Living surrounded by Native lands, she had grown up learning Ojibwe art in school as the only form of art instruction available besides drawing and painting. As Ojibwe traditions were not hers culturally, she did not want to work within them and instead began a pilgrimage of sorts, learning traditional European weaving techniques and materials from weavers from the United States, Spain, and Denmark.
Her work was recognized with awards—a fellowship from the Region 2 Arts Council and a residency at Shankill Castle—within months of each other. This funding allowed her to travel to Ireland, where she worked with Joe Hogan—renowned basket maker, artist, and author on traditional Irish basketry—and his son Ciaran, who teaches willow weaving near Galway. She describes her time weaving with the Hogan’s and basket makers from across Ireland, making willow skibs and other traditional forms, as moments of “pure bliss.”
Following this, she worked at Shankill Castle in Kilkenny in the studio of painter Elizabeth Cope and studied with German basket maker Heike Kahle. While the cultural traditions of Europe are only ancestrally hers, their technical foundations became integral to her practice. Through the years of study and research that have followed, Westrum has forged her own style and continues to explore the fusion of modern and traditional techniques, combining manufactured and locally sourced natural materials in her art basketry.
Her artistic practice is also a family endeavor. It was not unusual for excursions with her teenagers to involve beachcombing along Lake Superior for driftwood and stones or gathering grasses, barks, antlers, and rushes from her late grandfather’s farm near Lake Itasca. For Westrum, sculptural inspiration often begins with these found natural forms and objects. It could be the curve of an antler or a burl in a willow root that activates a piece and dictates its shape, flow, and color. These natural elements are combined with primary weaving materials such as round reed (rattan) and willow to create both sculptural works and practical vessels.
Westrum’s art has evolved to embody dialogue between dualities—tradition and innovation, nature and craft, family and community. A recent exhibition that reflected life in the north woods exemplified a collaboration of texture, color, symbolism, and feel, with some pieces sculptural and symbolic, while others were infused with the swirling colors of the environment. With the support of her community, she harvested an abundance of natural materials and completed the works using cords made from daylilies, irises, chives, and rhubarb skins, as well as cattails, sawgrass, and swamp grasses—all weaving themselves into her vision. Each piece became a unique sculptural expression, deeply rooted in place, material, and story.
2025
For more on Shannon’s work, visit Shannon Lucas Westrum

“Autumn Begins” 11″ x 15″ x 11.5″

“Rose” 8.5″ x 24″ x 6″