It’s the final Friday in July, that rare month where we have five of them, and so for our last Friday Feature this month, we bring the last entry in our ongoing series highlighting the clayware of Camille Bernal.
Over the last four weeks, we’ve brought you five of her pieces (two full-sized, one small, and two miniatures shown together), one of which has since sold. We’ve saved the showpiece for last: her Mountain Lion Bowl.
This day boasts another distinction, too: It’ll be a blue moon tonight, the second full moon in the calendar month. None of Camille’s pottery bears moon imagery, but this one does incorporate the color I associate with the blue moon — a cool and icy blue, barely more than white, the hue of our Grandmothers’ face in the darkened sky.
Here, it’s a color called Laguna Blue-Gray, a natural, plant-based indigenous paint, and it lends its pale tint to a willow branch . . . and to a seemingly much more powerful spirit, the mountain lion. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site:
Mountain Lion makes an appearance at each of the Four Directions on this old-style square bowl, flared and flowing open into something new and wholly alive. By Camille Bernal (Taos Pueblo), the bowl is hand-coiled red clay, with a pale yet warm slip. Mountain Lion is painted petroglyph-style on each side in soft Laguna Blue-Gray outlined in red, his tail extended up over his back. Bowl stands 4″ high by 8″ across at the widest point, with a flared opening of 9.5″ across at the lip (dimensions approximate). Another view shown below.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
It’s perhaps appropriate on this day; mountain lion sightings are now rare as the blue moon itself. I’ve written before at the role this great cat plays in local lore and habitat, and about the even greater existential risks this being faces:
The indigenous northeastern subspecies of mountain lion is thought to be entirely gone now, despite one recent report of an alleged sighting in Connecticut. In that part of the country, it’s as likely to be an escapee from one of those ghastly exotic-animal farms that dot the suburban landscape there as anything else.
There are still a few mountain lions to be found in the wilds of the Upper Midwest and the South (very south; Florida, actually). There are still larger concentrations of them here in the West, but their survival even here is no sure thing. Here in New Mexico, they can be hunted (with permits) year-round, and “destruction of property” and “loss of profit” are legal grounds for killing them. How very capitalist (and colonial): property and profits before life.
And life it is. Mountain lions are — have always been — an essential part of the regional ecosystem. Their size and speed and power keeps other predators in check; it also prevents overpopulation by largely-benign species such as deer and elk that, left to breed unchecked, will nonetheless destroy the habitat via sheer numbers of mouths and hooves.
Especially sickening is the fact that Mountain Lion is one of the wild creatures the state allows trophy “hunters” to pursue for sport and profit, including on so called “big-game ranches” where the “sport” is nonexistent, and wealthy weekend warrior-wannabes armed with military-grade firepower engage in the big-game equivalent of shooting fish in a barrel.
For peoples for whom the animal is sacred, or is regarded as a relative, it’s painful knowledge.
And this is the price, and the legacy, of human heedlessness, of arrogance and self-absorption and a self-centering worldview — one that has been brought into the global light of day only this week by a selfish and brutal American’s wanton (and illegal) slaughter of Cecil the Lion on a preserve in Zimbabwe. Here in the U.S., we are at risk of losing Cecil’s cousins, our own great cats, entirely.
That risk makes it all the more important to preserve the spirit of this powerful animal, to honor and invoke it in culture and art. It’s what our peoples do to call on specific powers, but also to potentiate the power of the spirit itself. As I said here last year:
Among Pueblo peoples, Mountain Lion has a role, but those stories are not mine to tell. Other peoples have made their stories public over the centuries, and a recurring theme is the animal’s awe-inspiring strength and power. Among my own, he manifests as Mishibizhiw, the Underwater Panther, a powerfully elemental form of the water serpent whose story I’ve told here before. There is nothing benign about the forces he embodies, but he is a guardian, and he provided a gift to the people, if not, perhaps, intentionally.
To the Zuni, he is likewise a guardian — in their case, of one of their Six Sacred Directions. He is thus a popular model for fetish carving, and makes an appearance in the “directional sets” of fetishes for which the Zuni are known. Like other important fetishes, he is given food and other offerings. According to some accounts (which I regard as unverifiable, because the Zuni rightly hold their traditions close and it’s unclear how much of what is written is simply a white person’s interpretation or invention), Mountain Lion is the keeper of the North, and considered elder brother to Bear. He is supposed to be represented by the color yellow, which certainly fits the color of his coat.
In today’s featured piece, however, Mountain Lion appears in a hybrid form, synthesized perhaps from multiple traditions, but manifesting in the unique vision of one Taos Pueblo artisan. The bowl shown above and below was created by Camille Bernal, to whom we introduced you a couple of months ago. She is Wings’s niece, the eldest daughter of his beloved late brother, and although she comes from a long artistic tradition, she’s a brilliant artist wholly in her own right, with an incredible innate talent for her chosen medium. She has taken Pueblo pottery in a new direction, blending styles and influences and stories with fundamentally traditional designs and practices to create something entirely new that yet pays tribute to traditions very, very old.
. . .
The design honors without appropriating from multiple traditions: the directional element, with Mountain Lion as a guardian or keeper of North, East, South, and West; the tail extended over the back that evokes old-style Zuni carvings, a people and tradition with which Camille has worked professionally for years; the delicate plant fronds extending upward behind the animal at either end, evocative of Taos Pueblo’s own eponymous red willow. And all of it is brought together in one singular style that is hers alone, combining old colors in new ways on a bowl shaped by hand to look simultaneously irregularly ancient and purposefully post-modern.
It’s classic Camille: complex, colorful, and completely compelling.
Come to think of it, that’s a good description for Mountain Lion, too.
The bowl itself would be something special even without the powerful artwork added to it. The Tewa clay that Camille uses as her primary medium is a thing of beauty on its own, distinctive in color and texture and intangible qualities: Warm and softly red, its finish is positively silken. Formed and fired into this particular bowl, with the rolling sides and rippling edges, it becomes something wholly unique, a classic indigenous art form filtered through a lens of abstraction and deconstruction and rebuilding into something simultaneously ancient and completely contemporary.
Of all of Camille’s works currently in inventory, this is the showpiece, the masterwork, the bold and dynamic piece that commands attention.
It’s fitting that it should do so in the company of a powerful and equally commanding spirit.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
