Another too hot, too dry day in what should be the rainy season, and we watch the amassing thunderheads with a longing yet jaundiced eye. There has been so little precipitation, thunder and lightning and wind and walls of stormclouds notwithstanding, that we know better than to expect that the skies will adhere to what were, not so long ago, their usual patterns.
Now, we are focused on the earth: the dry and dusty soil beneath our feet.
We have a few scant patches of green here and there, mostly low-lying areas where, when what little rain does deign to come arrives, it collects and settled before evaporating in the heat. The pond, long empty, is lined with hardy desert marsh grasses that can survive so well without water that they have begun to encroach on the basin’s floor. Meanwhile, the fields continue to brown, scorched and burned beneath the unrelenting glare of an unseasonable July sun.
In this region of Indian Country the earth ranges from the rich red-gold clay common to this area to the ashy light brown dirt found to points south and west, sandy and with the texture of talc. The latter is not much good for art or for crops, either one, but the former was part of what made this area so rich and fertile. The same soil that urged our crops upward into the light also formed the vessels in which the people once cooked their food and carried their water. And while the people do still use them for such purposes, to the outside world, they are now regarded as [often wildly expensive] pieces of art.
For local sculptors, though, the indigenous material of choice is often Pilar slate, a beautiful charcoal gray material shot through with blood-red whorls of siltstone matrix and inclusions of shimmering metallic threads. It’s material that is plentiful here, and readily accessible, with a luxurious feel like soapstone, as though it manages to be wet and dry simultaneously. Our earth here may be red, but most of the carving stone is not.
For sculpting rock in shades of red, our carvers must go further north.
There is, of course, the reddest of red earth that serves as carving rock: pipestone (no, we don’t call it by the colonizer’s appropriative label, “catlinite,” because its purpose as a medium for sacred pipes was clear to our for millennia). For some peoples in that part of Turtle Island, it is sacred, not to be used for any purpose other than the carving of sacred pipes and ceremonial objects. Down here, it’s regarded as a beautiful and wholly indigenous material, but not one restricted from artistic or commercial use, and some of the artists whose work we have carried over the years have used it to carve sculptures and fetishes, to accent other sculptures with it, or to turn it into jewelry.
But there is another red rock — in the family of colors we call “red,” at least — that serves as a popular carving medium for area Native artists, and one that can be found a bit closer to home. They need only travel as far north as Colorado or Utah to find beautiful specimens of pink alabaster.
Alabaster comes in many shades. Most think of it as white, and it’s true that there are is sizeable supply of it in he white/ivory/beige spectrum. There is also a spectacularly beautiful white form called spiderweb alabaster, for its rich brown and bronze webbing with siltstone, sometimes infused with metallic trace minerals. There is a green alabaster, and an orange one. And there is pink alabaster, which runs the gamut from a mostly putty-colored stone marbled with blood-red matrix to a more complex burgundy and beige combination to that which is, unequivocally, pink.
And it is pink alabaster that formed today’s featured works, a pair of complementary, if not precisely matching, pieces by one of the Pueblo’s most talented carvers, Ned Archuleta. Ned has worked over the years in many different stone media, but he always returns to his beloved pink alabaster. It’s a relatively soft stone, susceptible to his hand tools and yet relatively stable, too. He can coax giant figurative works from its lines, and finely detailed fetishes, as well. Today’s pair of of works are wrought in his classic, inimitable style: each following the lines of the stone itself, summoning the spirit within it by way of his beautiful indigenous minimalism, bringing into being two traditional elders who manifest in the old way.
The first, shown above, depicts a Pueblo man dressed in the traditional manner, hair long with an eagle feather tied into it, a rope of beads around his neck, body wrapped respectfully in a blanket. From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture gallery here on the site:
This representation of a Pueblo elder in traditional dress, complete with blanket, jewelry, and eagle feather, is the work of master carver Ned Archuleta (Taos Pueblo). This one really shows Ned’s ability to coax spirit from stone by following its immanent form, and features great attention to detail: the lines of the blanket, the strands of beads, the markings on the eagle feather in the hair. Formed out of a pink alabaster, it sits atop a pine wood base. Stands 12.25″ high including base (sculpture, 11.25″; base 1″). The sculpture is 6.25″ wide by 1.75″ deep; the base, 6.5″ wide by 3″ deep (all dimensions approximate).
Pink alabaster on pine base
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The second one, completed not long after the first, shares similarities of style: blanket, eagle feather, long hair. In this instance, the elder wears earrings instead of a necklace, but the effect is otherwise much the same. From its description in the same gallery:
Master carver Ned Archuleta (Taos Pueblo) works in classic Pueblo fashion — with the stone, not against it. The result is an iconic form of a Pueblo elder, wrapped in the traditional blanket and wearing an eagle feather. Pink alabaster mounted on cedar base. Sculpture stands 13-1/4 inches high including base (carving 11-3/4″ high; base, 1-1/2″ high); carving 5 inches across at widest point by 1-5/8″ deep; base 5-7/8 inches cross by 3.5 inches deep. All dimensions approximate.
Pink alabaster on cedar base
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Weight requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
Once again, the figure follows the lines of the stone, rather than struggling against it, imparting a sense of movement and freedom to the work. Both also show off the beautifully silken qualities of the pink alabaster to good effect: The matrix lines and inclusions are a deeper red, the color clay, brick, and blood, and Ned’s adherence to the stone turns them into the natural lines of eagle feather and blanket, like Nature’s own weaving.
Not too far west of here, there is an area of red rock sandstone formations that paint entire mountainsides the color of the deepest lines of matrix in the alabaster. There are more such formations north of us, in Colorado. But here, embedded deeply in the alabaster over eons, they remind me that such colors appear all over Turtle Island: the Pictured Rocks of the Northern Great Lakes, the pipestone pits of the Upper Midwest, the red mica clay of our own earth, and the blood-red lines drawn deep in the slate formations of this land.
We have long been called, by outsiders a “red people,” and we have reclaimed it as an indicator of identity and sovereignty, a descriptor not for the outside world to use, but one now belonging to us alone. It’s a reminder that our indigenous bodies and spirits, identities and histories, are as deeply embedded in a red-rock earth as the alabaster, the slate, the sandstone, the earthen clay of the land itself.
~ Aji
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