Lot 49: A Tammy Garcia redware vase

Tammy Garcia
Santa Clara, (b. 1969), 1992, a baluster-form redware pottery vase deeply carved with abstract Avanyu water serpents and geometric accents, with hand-painted slip highlights in the low areas.height 16in, diameter 9in

In Charles S. King's Spoken Through Clay: Native Pottery of the Southwest, Garcia talks about painting the low areas of her carved redware pieces to highlight her carved designs. "For me, I didn't paint the cream clay slip in the background very long on my pottery. It took a lot of time and layers and layers of slip. However, the end result was that the contrast of the white slip against the red polished surface set off the complexity of the designs (p. 224)." Garcia only used this method for about five years during the early 1990s.