For this holiday month, we’re going to take a slightly different approach to our Friday Feature series: Each week, I’m going to highlight a different category or art, seen through the lens of the work of one particular Native artist. Small themes tend to manifest organically throughout the posts of any given week, and we’ll choose category and artist based on whatever motifs have made themselves known in the preceding days.
This week, we’ve focused on work that, in one or another, seems to cross geographic and cultural boundaries, sharing style and space with art forms and imagery from our Asian relatives half a world away. And so, for our first Friday Feature of December, I’ve chosen to continue with similar motifs, by way of work that crosses cultural boundaries in other ways. Today, we feature the pottery of Wings’s niece, Camille Bernal.
We introduced you to Camille here last year. She’s an extraordinarily talented artist who has already developed her own signature style. We’re fortunate: Not only do we carry her work, but she lives just down the road from us, on adjoining land. She works in a style that honors her roots as a Taos Pueblo artist, but long ago branched out into new directions, carrying old traditional styles into new spaces that combine and recombine, trade and share substance and symbol alike. Through it all, she honors the spirits of the natural world, invoking and incorporating them into her work.
They say that our peoples are closely related ethnically to the peoples of the land mass the world now calls Asia. Occasionally, those ancient links show themselves: in an aural echo of language; in the steps of spiritual practice; in the symbolic expression of art. They show themselves in Camille’s work: echoes of a distant land and the now-distant warmth of other seasons.
We begin with the one that, for me, most evokes such sensibilities, one that crosses multiple lines of culture and geography and time itself, one that summons the spirit of a style now known as Art Deco. [We’ve covered the history of that ceramic tradition here before, and Camille’s tributes to it.] From this piece’s 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 at top.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$250 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
Perhaps my favorite among her works in our inventory, however, is a much smaller piece. It, too, reminds me of Asian styles of art, but it also evokes images of a wholly traditional part of Pueblo life: the fireplace. I wrote about it here last year, about the centrality of kiva fireplaces to traditional homes here, and about the chimenea adaptations that now dot the local landscape far outside the old village walls. The combination of the long square neck in this piece with the tiny flowers speaks to me of an all-embracing warmth. From its description:
This untitled miniature vase by Camille Bernal (Taos Pueblo) is one of Wings’s personal favorites: Fired from red area clay, its sturdy round base slopes gracefully upward, like a traditional kiva fireplace chimney, into a square opening onto the world. The exterior is a paler peach shade, accented with long-stemmed flowers tipped in gentle blues and grays and whites, stretching toward the sky. Stands 4″ high by 3.5″ across at widest point, with an opening at the square lip of 7/8″ (dimensions approximate). Top view shown below.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$180 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
The small catkin-like buds on the vase above find expression in one of her larger works, a classic necked pot in a soft snowy shade. The finish on this one looks and feels like silk, and its lines flow like water. From its description:
Camille Bernal (Taos Pueblo) creates a masterwork that blends old traditional shapes with contemporary expressions. Checkerboard patterns in warm red ochre arise and criss-cross like ancient paths from the base of the pot, their lines growing organically into the stems of gently-blooming flowers. Flower groupings are tipped in alternating Santo Domingo White, Laguna Blue-Gray, and charcoal shades. Stands 5″ high by 5.25″ across at the widest point, with a 2-7/8″ opening across the lip (dimensions approximate). Other views shown below.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
We have one more of Camille’s miniatures in inventory, a tiny work that evokes the art of our relations in a land more distant still: the scarabs of northern Africa. Scarab is the name of this diminutive pot, and she has placed these powerful little creatures at the Four Directions, small beautiful guardians among flowering stalks that look like the local red willows. From its description:
At the Four Directions, tiny scarabs rest among delicate blue flowers on this miniature traditional-style pot by Camille Bernal. Hand-coiled of earthy red clay, the little pot bears a silky slip in an ivory shade, accented with scarabs and plant life in soft natural colors. Pot stands 2.25″ high by 2.75″ across at the widest point, with a 1.25″ opening across the lip (dimensions approximate). Top view shown below.
Tewa clay; plant-based paints
$125 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
And finally, we come to the large piece that is perhaps her masterwork among the inventory she has placed with us, the Mountain Lion bowl.
It’s a work that is sui generis, a style wholly its own. And yet, its look, its feel, its form and shape and flow all evoke a sense of something older, broader, deeper, one that brings together traditions and spirits from around the world and fuses them into something unique, something greater than the sum of its parts.
I’ve written about this piece before, too, about the symbolism of Mountain Lion and his connection to this place, about the uses of spirit bowls and spirit plates in our peoples’ way of life. But the free-form flow of this bowl is one that evokes the spirit of art forms found in far-off lands, among people who are our cousins made distant by geography and culture, by space and time, but who nonetheless share with us that indefinable something that goes deeper than blood, into the spiraling links of ancestral DNA. From this work’s description:
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
For all her towering talent and the beauty of her work, Camille’s pottery remains remarkably modestly priced. As her reputation grows, that won’t last; I fully expect her work to assume a place among the ranks of highly valued, eminently collectible Pueblo pottery before much longer. For now, though, people have a chance to snap up the work of an emerging young artist at accessible price points.
We carry the work of a wide array of other Taos Pueblo potters in our Other Artists: Pottery gallery, as well. Such pieces are for more traditional, assuming form out of the Pueblo’s own micaceous clay. artists include Wings’s aunt, the internationally-renowned Juanita Suazo DuBray; his late sister, Cynthia Bernal Pemberton; and a long list of distant relatives and friends, including miniatures by Bernadette Track, Olivia Martinez, and Leatrice Gomez; small pots by Wilson Appa and Benito Romero; a substantial selection of traditional clay mugs by Jessie Marcus; and one work by an indigenous potter from the northern Mexico village of Mata Ortiz (a remarkable story in itself, one you can read here).
Any of these works, the more traditional micaceous pottery or pieces in Camille’s newer fusion style, would make perfect holiday gifts . . . or additions to a personal collection.
~ 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.
