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 large jar is one which she used to call her “Bag” jars. The form is reminiscent of a leather bag with asymmetric sides and opening.  This jar is massive in size but with an amazing overall form. There is a fluidity to the shape of the piece and the coloration of the black and brown, from the firing. The neck has a braided leather strap with added shells.  I’m not sure the photos do justice to the organic style of the shape of the jar or the size!  The piece is in very good 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