Navajo Lorraine Williams, born in Arizona in 1955, was not raised with the tradition of pottery making; she did not begin working with clay until her adulthood. Today, her immense tribal pots and colorful Indian icons have made Navajo pots more commercially viable than ever before.
Lorraine was raised in Sweetwater, Arizona (near Kayenta and Teec Nos Pos), on a red mesa near Four Corners. She was originally given the name Tsi (daughter) by her medicine-man-father, Donald Yazzie. Her grandfather was one of the few rangers at Mesa Verde. Three of Lorraine's seventeen brothers and sisters also work in clay.
Lorraine says she was aware of "potteries" at Indian ceremonies when she was growing up but that she didn't know the pots were made at home; she thought they were bought. She did not know anyone at that time who made pottery except "an old lady near Shiprock" who made ceremonial clay drums. "My father would go over there to get pots for ceremony, but I just assumed the old lady got them somewhere, I didn't know she made them. (Now) I try not to assume. I could be wrong, and we try never to ask questions. Just put in your mind what you see, and some day you will use it.
Lorraine married George Williams in 1977, and today they live in Cortez, Colorado. George, is a plant operator for Mobile Oil Company at Aneth, Utah; they have two girls and two boys. George Williams is one of Rose Williams' sons, brother of potters Alice Cling, Sue Ann Williams , and Susie Williams Crank. "I grew up in a family of potters." He relates. "Mother was always saying: 'Do pottery! You can buy a vehicle or school clothes.' But I never wanted to get my hands in it."George is the son of Rose Williams, one of the best known Navajo potters, who had been making pottery for years to trade for food. Lorraine was adept at making beads and sandpaintings, and she was a weaver. "But when I married George I saw pottery with new eyes." Her new eyes led to Lorriane's beginning with clay about 1980. Ultimately, Lorraine would make the largest pots produced at Navajo today.
"I didn't know how to draw. You don't want to compete with your in-laws. Rose didn't draw, so I decided to draw on the clay and to make cutouts. By mistake I made a hole in a pot, and I went ahead and cut it out."
Lorraine confides that she has had epilepsy all her life. "Everyone around me thought I had a taboo. No one believed that I really had epilepsy. It went away for about five years and I thought it had gone but it came back. I found that working with clay kept it away."
One of their sons had epilepsy too. Lorraine told me the story of how one day she was hitchhiking to the hospital with her epileptic son when they came upon a black bear. "I thought he would attack us but I started to sing and he didn't. I'm traditional but bears are not in our tradition, we are afraid of them. We bring in someone in bear costume to someone who is ill to scare the spirit out. We use the bear for that, otherwise bear is taboo. I don't know why he saved us that day."
Lorraine Williams, however, did want to learn the art of pottery making. "At first," she says, "I'd stand around watching my mother-in-law at her Shonto Corner home – pretending that I wasn't. And then I'd go home and try. I stay home a lot with the kids, and so I like doing art from the trailer. In the beginning it was just for fun, but now it's my income."
William's pottery is made in the traditional Navajo manner. Her shapes and designs are delicate, graceful, and innovative, and she uses color sparingly – russets and yellows – by applying clay slips as highlights. In her early work, Williams etched recognizable Navajo symbols into the clay in place of the biyo'. Lately, her drawings have become more intricate – bears, Yei figures, and horned moons (pictured at right). According to Williams, "Horned moons appear in sandpainting when there is an eclipse of the sun. A baby born at this time is in danger of bad health, and blessings are required to prevent bad luck for all." Lorraine Williams has even made a few pieces that abandon the vessel shape entirely. These are hollow, cylindrical works that contain unusual design elements like a bear's claw breaking through the surface.
Navajo weavers boil plant material – Lorraine calls them weeds – to make dyes for their yarn. Loraine was used to doing that for her rugs, so she appropriated these colors in the beginning for decorating her clay. Her father, a very traditional man, did not like her using the plant colors, the same ones that were used for body paint in ceremonials, so he asked her not to do that.
For this reason Lorraine resorted to buying commercially made pigments for her designs on the clay, especially the gray-blue; but the red is natural red sand that makes a grainy texture she likes. She fires each pot outside, separately and upside down, for about three hours with a lot of wood for a very hot burn. "We need lots of fire; it had to get very hot," Lorraine advises. "If wind comes you lose the pot. We fire more in the summer than in the winter."
Navajo pots are historically coated with hot pitch after firing to give a shiny, more impervious finish. For applying the pinon pitch, Lorraine brings the pot back from the firing site and puts it on her stove burner to heat up slowly. She says this can't be done outside because the weather change may thermally shock the hot pot and crack it. The bucket of pitch must be hot as well as the pot. "When the pot is black from the burner, I dip a stick with a rag or a paper tied on it into the hot pitch and swipe it in and out of my hot pot."
Pottery was not made for sale on this reservation until the 1980s when galleries sought the work. Lorraine says that Navajo pottery had been done previously just for functional and ceremonial use and trade, not to sell. When they saw that the pots could bring money into that area, the families and relatives began to work together on pottery. Lorraine says that still the majority of pots are made for ceremony and "that's why no one knows much about Navajo pottery."
Her first Indian Market appearance was in 1992; she went home with a second place ribbon, losing out by a narrow margin to her famous sister-in-law, Alice Cling. Navajo Pottery had had its own category in the annual Gallup, New Mexico, Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial only the last five or so years. Lorraine is proud of the fact that she took the Best in Category prize for excellence in 1993. She continues to win major awards at Flagstaff, Shiprock, Santa Fe, and Gallup.