Stevens, Jacquie – Micaceous White Gourd Bowl (1990s)
Jacquie Stevens is best known for the simple use of forms on her pottery. Over the years, she brought an unexpected dimension to Native pottery with her immense, undulating vessels. Her Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) ancestry inspired her to add basket weaving and other materials as embellishments to her undecorated forms. Her aesthetic of the organic challenges the symmetry of Pueblo pottery and provides a provocative glimpse into the future of Native pottery. This bowl has an asymmetric form with the sides pushed out. It has the shape of a gourd, but there is a ridge around the rim of the bowl, giving it a feel of completion. The bowl is made from white micaceous clay. It is thin-walled. The mica gives just the right amount of reflection in the light. The piece is in excellent condition with no chips, cracks, restoration, or repair. It is signed on the bottom in the clay, “Jacquie Stevens”. “The ceramics of Jacquie Stevens are to the casual observer beautiful, lyrical ware, but on a more subtle level, they are often subliminal statements about sensuous shapes, and the texture and volume of the human body—in an age when television advertising (not figurative painting or sculpture) has capitalized most powerfully on people’s love of and need for the truly human in their lives. Stevens’s work is also intellectual, playing on the ceramic traditions of potters from all over the world. Even when she is not working metaphorically, the artist’s involvement with texture, whether it be of scored clay, embellishments of beads, or the smoothness of hides, is her hallmark.” Spoken Through Clay