Yenny weaving at the fair in Bogotá.

I met Yenny at an Indigenous artists fair in Bogotá. I was not looking for plaited work that day. RFB Woven Art has always been built around the dense coiled werregue baskets that the Wounaan are best known for, the kind that take months or years to weave and arrive layered and architectural and almost impossibly fine. I knew that lineage. I had not spent much time with the other one.

Then I saw what she was creating.

Plaited werregue is the older Wounaan technique. Single-layer, no internal coil, woven as a continuous surface from base to rim. It is the construction Wounaan families have used for everyday vessels for generations, made for carrying and storing rather than for display. The pieces in front of me were that tradition pulled into a different scale. Floor-height. Sculptural. And, most striking, they folded flat.

Yenny works with a small team of weavers in a remote community on the Pacific coast of the Chocó. She is the one who comes to the city. The team works together on each piece, in multiple stages, hand-dyeing the werregue palm fiber and weaving the form over the course of weeks. The fold-flat property is not a shipping innovation. It is what plaited werregue has always done when the fiber is properly prepared. The structure can compress without breaking and reopen into form. A well-made plaited basket has always had to do this, because that is how it traveled with the family that made it.

What I brought back

Three pieces, all different.

The largest is twenty-seven inches tall, with a single broad diagonal sash of plant-dyed black crossing a natural ground. The middle piece is darker and denser, a moodier silhouette built around overlapping shadows. The smallest is the outlier, dyed across its whole surface in forest greens and copper rather than the traditional black-on-cream. That one stopped me. I had not seen a Wounaan piece treated that way before.

I bought the three of them and we talked about what would come next.

What is being woven now

Yenny and her team are currently completing a commissioned group of ten more pieces. Five in forest green, five in burnt orange. Each one hand-dyed and hand-woven across multiple stages, which means the group has taken several months to make. They are not finished yet. They are not on the site yet. I wanted to be honest with you about both.

If you have already collected coiled Wounaan from RFB Woven Art, this is a sister tradition rather than a different one. Same people. Same fiber. A different relationship to time and structure. If you are new to the Wounaan, this might be the easier door to walk through. The plaited pieces sit at a more accessible price than the coiled work, not because they take less skill but because they take less time to complete. Both forms ask for mastery. They ask for it in different ways.

How to know when the next group arrives

The first three are live, only 1 left. When the next ten arrive, they will go to the people who have asked for early notice before they reach the full list. If you would like to be on that early-notice group, just reply to any RFB Woven Art email. There is no formal sign-up. I keep the list myself.

Yenny is back in her community now. Her team is at work. I will be back in Colombia before the year is out.

— Jen