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| Richard Zane Smith’s pottery project 8/15/02 In the Blue Rain Gallery, which was showing all Indian Art, an artist named Richard Zane Smith was introduced to talk about a piece of pottery he’d done. It would be sold by silent auction, and the funds would be donated to the Taos Community Against Violence group. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay. What did I know about bowls and artists and what could you say about a piece, anyway? Still, I was intrigued. I found myself moving closer, joining the people making a circle. I watched him tell the story of a bowl with a lid and four figures sitting around the lid, holding spikes that kept a rust-colored square of cloth in place. Upon closer look, the cloth resembled a veil that seemed striped with blood stains, covering something. |
| He told us the veil and the figures represented family members who keep hidden the secrets of sexual abuse, leaving the victim under wraps and unable to heal, because he/she is shielded from the light. I felt a lump in my throat as he took out the spikes, and lifted the piece of cloth. Underneath was a greenish, molten piece, with barely recognizable human features, rotting away in the darkness. I knew what it was like to be so covered up and unrecognizable, to fear the woman I had become, to be just as invested as the four figures in keeping the secret buried. She looked like a sacrificial lamb, without benefit of altar or flames. |
| As he took the lid off, Richard explained that women from native communities sent him by email and letter their own personal stories, symbols, cards, and poems to him. By including them inside this bowl, they were giving voice to their private hell for the purpose of healing, their own and others who might gain strength and courage from it. He took one story printed on canary yellow paper and read it to us. Her name was Sunshine, and what happened to her occurred when she was eight years old, changing her life and her world forever. |
| Then he drew out the pieces, a clay sculpture of a someone without arms, lying on her belly, with one leg bent, foot raised in the air. That's when the tears started coming to me. Her face in the dirt, her body naked, powerless to stop what was happening, what had happened, but kicking against it all, and all alone. There was a feather tied to a bundle of sage with blue beads running up and down the bundle; there was a ball of crumpled up tin foil that Richard had squeezed while he listened on the phone to a woman telling him her story. Most of the contributors to this piece were women, he told us. Women were more willing to come forward and tell the truth than men who had been victims. |
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