GUEST CURATOR
ERIN
POLLARD
Erin Pollard thinks about time differently. Long before she became a basket weaver, she trained as a dancer, learning to experience the world through physicality and rhythm. She later spent nearly two decades working in fashion in New York before finding her way back to something that had surrounded her as a child growing up in Maine: watching her mother, Peggy, weave baskets by hand.
Now living in Brooklyn, Erin has founded a studio practice based in Maine, where she grew up, crafting functional carriers that honor New England’s regional history. For Erin, weaving is both an inherited language and a way of being present. The hours required to make something by hand, the ecosystems that provide its materials, the repetition of the gesture itself—all have shaped the way she thinks about craft, care and our relationship to time.
Erin is fascinated by what happens when repetitive handwork quiets the mind, and by the basket itself—one of our earliest human tools—as a vessel for stories about time, care and survival. Dance still grounds her, while the creative dialogue she shares with her husband, designer Jason Miller, has given her an appreciation for everything from sunken living rooms and platform beds to the essential nature of wall-to-wall carpet.
Her recommendations are just as personal: a book she believes every woman should carry, the Maine dance program that shaped her understanding of movement, ceramic lighting she describes simply as “out of hand,” and the lip color that convinced a red-lip devotee to switch things up.
UNDERWATER WEAVING — THROW BASKET
“If I were to recommend one of our baskets as a starting point for a collection it would be our throw baskets.”
BATES DANCE FESTIVAL
“My dance training has always grounded me. I spent summers training at Bates in Maine where my understanding of the language of movement expanded.”
JASON MILLER
“My husband designs lighting, furniture and interiors. While we see the world very differently, our expressions of it often coexist well together, and I find the visual language of our work in situ together to be a happy marriage.”
SARAH CREAL
MANSPLAIN
“I love a red lip, but this summer I traded it for Sarah Creal’s Mansplain.”
CAROLINE BLACKBURN FOR ROLL & HILL
“Caroline Blackburn’s ceramic lighting for Roll & Hill is out of hand.”
“I’m really into reading several books at a time. One that I think every woman should carry with them is The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin.”