This is a striking miniature by Nancy Youngblood.  It is one of her very deeply carved melon bowls that swirl down from the neck to the base to create the “S” shape.  There are sixteen ribs and each rib is carved into the clay and each is fully stone polished.  Consider that each rib has two “sides” to be polished and the surface area of the piece is about double its size!  It is signed on the bottom in the clay, “Nancy Youngblood 2020”.

Nancy said of her pottery:

“Technically, this is one of the most difficult pieces to polish because you are continually flipping it around. You polish one side of a rib, and then you have to flip it real fast and polish the other side.  I call that an S swirl. My grandmother was doing pieces a long time ago with that S swirl and so was my uncle Camilo. I saw a piece of my uncle Camilo’s pottery at a gallery here in Santa Fe. It was just a vase, but it had the big swirls on it all the way around. I wanted to make something uniquely mine and not copy theirs so that’s why I created these very intricate swirls.” Nancy Youngblood, Spoken Through Clay