Today is our last entry featuring pieces and topics around the theme of what I think of as the Season of the Buffalo.
Our last piece in this series is substantial, in every sense of the word. The sculpture itself is sizeable, but more than that, it’s weighty. Weighty in terms of its heavy solidity, and weighty in terms of the symbolism it carries.
From its description in the Other Artists: Sculpture Gallery here on the site:
“Laying Down Buffalo”
This resting buffalo was created by Paul Dancebow (Taos Pueblo). A big, solid, heavy animal spirit, he is carved of gray steatite, or soapstone, imported from Canada, and the feel is complex: It manages to seem both warm and cool to the touch at the same time. On the reverse, his tail stands out in relief, curled around the back of his body. Stands 6″ at its highest point by 10.75″ long by 2.25″ across (dimensions approximate).
Steatite (soapstone)
$450 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Weight requires special handling; extra shipping charges apply
Paul is Wings’s cousin; sculpture is his chosen medium, taking large blocks of stone or wood and shaping them into something recognizeable. We have another of his pieces in inventory, one that is from Wings’s personal collection and that I’ve featured here at The NDN Silver Blog already; it’s an example of form wrought from wood, revealing the essential spirit beneath by way of a less-than-usual choice of raw material.
Today’s featured piece does likewise, and again, by way of an unusual medium, this time in stone. And it’s not a stone generally found here; it’s steatite that he had imported from Canada, something found closer to where I’m from than from the mountains of Taos Pueblo. It’s a form of soapstone, an especially soft and silky kind.
Like all forms of soapstone, steatite is, essentially, talc. It’s classified as a metamorphic rock, but generally speaking, talc occurs secondarily to other host rock. As we learned in grade-school science, talc is the softest known mineral (a proposition that has apparently not been supplanted by new data all these decades later), although most forms of soapstone contain other minerals that contribute to its texture, making it [somewhat] harder than pure talc. Such minerals commonly include mica, forms of quartz, and rhyolite, among others. It frequently co-appears with, and often began life as, such minerals as dolomite, peridot, and serpentine. all stones with long histories of traditional use among the continent’s indigenous peoples.
Steatite is finer-grained than ordinary soapstone, and is closer to pure talc, making it especially susceptible to carving. One of its unusual properties is its ability to hold heat and radiate it at a very slow rate, which makes it especially useful for pottery of the sort that gets used: bowls, plates, cups for eating and drinking, pots and pans for cooking. In some places, it’s still being used for cookware. It’s been used culturally and artistically for millennia, to create the bowls of ceremonial pipes, for fetishes and small carvings, for larger sculptural pieces.
Among mineralogical experts (and amateurs), there seems to be a consensus that soapstone has a “greasy feel.” It’s a phrase that appears over and over again, across multiple sources. I don’t think that quite gets at the stone’s real texture. It is indeed smooth, and it tends to feel very cool, but warms up rapidly under your skin. It almost feels very slightly damp, which I’ve always attributed to the heat dynamics involved, assuming that part of that is due simply to human perspiration: With lighter-colored bits of soapstone, if you place your finger on it for a long moment and then pull it away, you’ll see a damp fingerprint. But “greasy” sounds less than pleasant, and in my experience, soapstone (including its steatite form) is very, very touchable — almost compulsively so.
Soapstone is found all over the world, in deposits large and small. Two of the largest quarries here in the U.S. are in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, both of which have been worked for thousands of years. Washington State and Wyoming also have decent-sized deposits; smaller deposits appear all over the Upper Midwest and on up into Canada, as well as New England, the Mid-Atlantic region, and the South. Worldwide, major contemporary producers include Brazil, India, and China. When Paul sold us this piece, he told us it was his first use of steatite, imported specifically for him to try. Whether he’s continued to use it I don’t know, but in this instance, at least, it’s made for a beautiful carving from a medium not normally used in this area.
It’s an unusual stone, soft and malleable, susceptible to shaping by the most rudimentary tools, including antlers and other rocks. And yet, it’s solid and substantial enough to hold form once carved, without eroding or disintegrating. It is, perhaps, a perfect medium by which to call forth the Buffalo: often a bucolic beast, seemingly stolid and even placid, yet capable of great ferocity and power when required; a being of soft hide and lush hair, yet also of great strength of bone and horn and hoof; a spirit simultaneously of calm and of courage.
Come to think of it, it’s also an apt existential metaphor for our peoples: adaptable to external pressures to the extent needed to ensure survival, yet strong in our cultural traditions and identities.
Perhaps that’s another reason why I think of this time, this change of seasons from green warmth to readying for cold and dark of winter, and our own adaptation to it, as the Season of the Buffalo.
~ Aji
