Touchmarks: The Social Life of Plastic Baskets is a cultural and artistic investigation of a transnational object: the plastic basket. The ‘social life’, suggested by Arjun Appadurai, articulates the shifts in meaning, form, function, and use activated through the action of exchange. This work presents invented objects, cast and fabricated in pewter from plastic baskets fragments, in an attempt to capture the quotidian existence of plastic baskets’ use, prevalence and exchange. The transformation of the woven pattern, third generation to its handicraft source, wicker to plastic to pewter, obscures the object’s source. Woven basket? Woven tapestry? Plastic chair? Why is the woven pattern still applied to mass-produced goods even though modes of production have long displaced the weaving process that designated its original marks? Is it an attempt to visually humanize what is otherwise labeled as generic production code (No 901) or reduced to a vast country (Made in India, Made in China)? Or does the plastic woven pattern, as simulacra to the handicraft of basketry, evoke a longing for that which the hand once crafted?