She is not made of paint. She is made of a weed.

The angel stands in a red dress, dark-haired, holding small bouquets of wildflowers in each hand — one blue, one yellow. Her wings are cut from pressed kudzu leaf paper, the same material that forms the pale, textured ground behind her. The whole figure sits on a crackle-finish background inside a simple oak frame no bigger than a paperback book. It looks like something found in a grandmother's house, which is exactly the point.

Nancy Basket calls these figures NunNeHe — the Cherokee word for beings that appear not in white robes but in color, not as ethereal abstractions but as presences you might encounter at the edge of a field. Her angels carry flowers instead of swords. They are made from a vine that most of the American South considers a plague, hand-pressed into paper in a hundred-year-old cabin in Walhalla, South Carolina. Every piece of the plant gets used: roots ground to powder, vines woven into cloth, leaves pressed flat and dried into sheets that hold their pale green-brown tone for decades.

The angel stands in a red dress, dark-haired, holding small bouquets of wildflowers in each hand — one blue, one yellow.

Basket learned kudzu work in 1989 after moving to the Carolinas to be closer to the Cherokee Reservation and to the elders who still remembered the old ways. She had already helped found the first modern basketry guild in the United States, in Seattle in 1980. But it was kudzu that became her signature — the vine nobody wanted, transformed into paper, sculpture, and storytelling. "I feel the old ones guiding my fingers," she has said, "and I am proud to be making something beautiful."

The accompanying artist card, included with the piece, tells the full story of the design and the material in Basket's own words.