With And Without Words
by Andrew Peterson

AS SOMEONE WHO works with the written word and with the more elemental language of clay, Nora Naranjo-Morse doesn't hesitate to admit there are some things for which words are inadequate.

Asked where she gets her ideas and inspiration, the Santa Clara Pueblo writer and sculptor relies on a gesture. She makes a fist with one hand, holds it just below her rib cage and presses inward.

"It's where you are a child," she says, describing a place Inside where she is free from what people think, a place where she can put aside the many assumptions that accompany categories like Native American, woman and artist.

Such categories can become stifling along the road between Santa Fe and Taos, where the phrase "Indian artist" brings more than a few expectations. The problem dates back more than a century, Naranjo-Morse says, to when traders visited the pueblos to buy pottery. They had the financial power to compel artisans to use shapes and patterns that would sell well to white buyers--whether or not those forms had any connection with local traditions. These days, the traders' role has been taken over by art galleries catering to Santa Fe's wealthy white tourists.

Naranjo-Morse has managed to keep herself remarkably removed from the pressures of the marketplace. Her work doesn't conform to the expectations of gallery owners, nor does it strictly adhere to the traditions of her own people. She doesn't make pots and she doesn't limit herself to the well-known black Santa Clara clay. Rather, she sculpts figures out of her own mixture of clays from New Mexico mesas. Like a storyteller, she creates characters, who take on lives of their own.

Although Naranjo-Morse allows herself the freedom to create new forms, her work also draws integrally on traditions. Her mother, a well-known potter, never gave Naranjo-Morse lessons about how to work with clay, but Naranjo-Morse absorbed the painstaking process by which the Santa Clara people have transformed the earth into pottery for centuries.

She says she can spend up to three weeks readying a batch of clay before she even begins sculpting it. Preparation involves trips to mesas near her home in Espanola, New Mexico, where she extracts clay from certain veins that run there. Once carried home, the clay is put through an elaborate process of mining and drying, which Naranjo-Morse complicates further by adding clay from the Taos area.

"I think that this process is to make you realize that you're taking this from the earth and to make you respect that," she says. The work forces her to slow down, to look around, to take in what's happening in the world around her.

"As a modern woman, I've tried sometimes to take shortcuts-and it doesn't work," she says.

Her studio is lined with her recent sculptures, along with a chalkboard filled with scribbled writing. "My life is happening to me," she has written, with the same words in her native Tewa language just below.

Increasingly, Naranjo-Morse has been writing poetry about her sculpture, telling stories about the figures she creates and about the process of their creation. Her recently published book, Mud Woman, is a unique interweaving of sculpture and poetry.

Many books have been written about Pueblo pottery, she says, but so far they've all come from the outside. "There's never been one written from the inside, by someone who actually takes the clay from the earth, who has mud on their boots all the time."

She holds out her powerful, deeply lined palms. "There's never been one written by someone who has hands like these."