In our way, the very earth itself is animated by spirit: Earth writ large, on a planetary scale; and earth in lower case, humble dirt beneath our own feet. In either understanding, it is something living, something with its own force and power and identity, something that gives up its gifts to the rest of us in ways both practical and beautiful.
But it also gives up gifts that are alive in a more conventional sense of the word, gifts that are not earth itself but are nevertheless of it. I speak, of course, of the plant spirits, of the the trees and grass and flowers and herbs, of all the healing and medicinal plants and those whose most obvious quality is their beauty.
Sometimes, gifts of both varieties come together in one outstanding work of art.
Such is the case with today’s featured piece, a work by Wings’s niece, Camille Bernal. We’ve devoted this month’s Friday Feature series to her work; this is the next-to-last entry in the collection, pottery and posts alike. This piece is one wholly of the earth, but alive with the energy of new and flowering growth.
It’s a work that harks back to what is, for the dominant culture, an older style, and a classic one: Art Deco, a look that is entirely distinctive, evocative of the European elegance of a near-century ago. In her hands, it becomes something equally classic, yet wholly her own; something that straddles the boundaries of two old traditions of the medium, updated for the new millennium. From its description in the Other Artists: Pottery gallery here on the site:
This compact vase evokes one of the first heydays of modern Indian pottery. Fashioned in Art Deco style by Camille Bernal (Taos Pueblo), it’s hand-coiled of a a beautifully warm red clay, accented with a gentle pastel shade, hand-painted long-stemmed flowers arising delicately from the base and encircling the whole. Vase stands 7-1/8″ high by 4.5″ across at the widest point, with a 1-1/8″ opening at the lip (dimensions approximate). Top view shown below.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$250 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
I wrote about this vase late last year, about its relationship to the Art Deco style of pottery and about what we see when we look at it. It’s probably not what most people would think. I began with a bit of the history of the style:
Art Deco is shorthand for Arts Décoratifs, or, more completely, for the name of the famed 1925 Paris exhibition, Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (in English, the International Exposition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts). And, indeed, “decorative” and “industrial” both were very much the essence of the style it embodied.
Art Deco arose as a successor to Art Nouveau, taking hold after the War to End All Wars (otherwise known, eventually, as World War I). It was a time when the Western world had wearied greatly of conflict brought home to roost, but not at all of the colonialism in which such conflicts are rooted. Marked by an unbridled faith in the twinned shibboleths of “technology” and “progress,” it was characterized by a love of extravagant beauty, and of profligate spending to acquire it.
Now, don’t get me wrong: In art, architecture, and fashion, the Art Deco Period is for me tied with a couple of others for the title of “favorite.” The surface imagery of the era is one that I dearly love — but that doesn’t blind me to the existential flaws in the foundation of its towering style, nor to the harms to indigenous peoples the world over that accompanied it heyday.
As with everything in contemporary life, we must experience it through dual lenses, one that a neither twinned nor, most often, even particularly coordinated. It can make for spectacularly distorting cultural astigmatism, if you aren’t careful. But once your eyes become acclimated to seeing more than one world simultaneously, it opens your field of vision up to whole next contexts and connections, a universe of extraordinary relationships and things.
This was in the forefront of my mind when I wrote about this piece before. As I said then:
But for purposes of today’s feature, I want to focus on Art Deco’s identity as a paean in visual and tangible form to technological and social “progress.” It’s a faith in change, but it’s also a faith in cultural dominance, and one of a very specific sort . . . one that has not been particularly good for our peoples. So why would a Native artist want to adopt the style?
How better to expose the shibboleths of a dominant culture, to render them mute and moot, than to take control of its artistic manifestations, to assume and assert dominion over them, ultimately, to subvert them and remake them into something truer, something that reflects our peoples’ own reality?
And so taking a shape and style that is one of the most significant hallmarks of European modernism, and dominant-culture extravagance and excess, and using it to create a piece in her own indigenous tradition, a piece in the form of something much more ancient?
Now that’s subversive.
It’s subversive in more than one sense, of course. The very fact that Camille’s work incorporates modern and post-modern techniques and styles, yet rejects contemporary synthetic materials, preferring — indeed, insisting upon — returning to the gifts of the earth by way of local clays and plant-based paints, upends modern art forms and links their particular style back to a much more ancient tradition. As I noted before:
And it’s not merely the shape, combining something dating back millennia with something extremely modern. It’s the ornamentation. The floral pattern is exactly the sort one would expect to find on genuine Art Deco pottery and clayware — but it’s rendered in warm, earthy red tones on a yellow ochre created by Camille’s own hand from the plants that dot the canyons in the Taos Pueblo area. It takes a style that placed its faith in commercial syntheticism, and turns it back upon itself into something wholly natural.
That’s subversive, too, and it works as an object lesson about the importance of tradition, of history, of what’s essential: A style dependent to a significant degree on artificiality is taken back to an earlier day and rendered, true to form and detail, in wholly Nature-based substances.
And so, we circle back around the hoop to where we began, to what is essential, elemental, to the things of the earth and the gifts it bestows: Earth, animated and alive.
~ 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.
