Spirals Take You Somewhere.
A complex and elegant vessel-inspired sculpture, Nautilus, 2006, is made from shimmering micaceous clay. Built from a single coil, the piece is hollow in its center and exhibits the singular style of its maker, the late Diné artist Christine Nofchissey McHorse.

Born in Arizona, McHorse learned to make ceramics in the Pueblo tradition from her husband’s grandmother. At age 50, however, she ceased making traditional painted vessels and moved toward sculpture, where she found her own artistic voice. She also started exploring the fundamentals of structure, seeing, as she once told an interviewer, “how far I can push the shape or how much extension I can get without losing the strength of the clay.” The result was unadorned, satiny black forms that boggle the mind, such as Nautilus, which was inspired by a spiral shell in an Edward Weston photograph.

“Spirals, to me, take you somewhere,” said the visionary ceramist, who died from complications of COVID in 2021 at the age of 72. “They’re like vortexes, they’re like tornados; they’re a force within themselves.” We are grateful for the artists who, like McHorse, take us somewhere and share with us such beauty. And we mourn the many creative people we’ve lost during this pandemic. —The Editors