Erick Nascimento Vidal

Erick is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Durham, working on a variety of creative engagements with basketry in contemporary Northwest Amazonia. This includes innovations in form, materials and woven patterns in basketry made for the handicrafts trade; discussions about basketry-teaching in Indigenous  schools; and Indigenous interpretation of the meanings of basketry in mythological narratives. Erick also experiments with ideas for analysing weaving technique via drawing, binary coding and mathematical concepts. He holds two MA degrees, one from the University of São Paulo, and one from the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts (University of East Anglia), and has undertaken a placement at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He also participates in events held by the Oxfordshire Basketmakers Association. Erick’s earlier work dealt with discussions about the definition, history and comparative study of writing systems and the interaction between different media (such as speech, writing and basketry) in social action. This is part of a continuing engagement with linguistics, cybernetics and related disciplines, in the context renewed interest in the utility of structuralist methods in anthropology and beyond.