D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
March
2009
Out of His Gourd
Silver City artist Pierre L. Nichols is crazy about ancient Mimbres pottery, which he re-creates using gourds instead of clay.
Story and photos by Donna Clayton
Pierre Nichols' journey back to New Mexico was guided by bulldozers.
The Silver City artist grew up in the Chicago area, where he attended the Chicago Art Institute on a scholarship, after which he served a stint in the armed forces as a combat photographer. He first came to the Land of Enchantment in 1969, when he accepted a volunteer position working with troubled youth.
 |
Pierre Nichols displays the various
stages of his artwork: a whole gourd, one cleaned and with its top cut
off, and a finished piece of art that resembles ancient Mimbres pottery. |
His creativity as a writer and artist enhanced by a decade of living in the northeastern part of New Mexico, Nichols moved on to Casper, Wyo. There he owned his own western art gallery, the Goose Egg Gallery, exhibiting and selling his own ink drawings and paintings as well as the works of other artists.
Always inspired by beautiful terrain, particularly mountains, and ready to leave the long Wyoming winters behind, Nichols decided he'd found a new home when he discovered New Mexico's southwestern corner.
"I heard about the Gila forest. They were digging up ancient pottery with bulldozers!" he exclaims. "I thought, 'Think of the history that must be in that area!'"
He came out for a visit and fell in love with the mountains, the small towns, the people — and moved to Silver City in 2004.
Around the turn of this century, Nichols' art had taken a new turn, from painting canvases to working with gourds. "I was getting in bottle gourds from Mexico and working with them. I was looking at a gourd one day and I thought, 'If I cut the top off that, it'd look like a pot.' So I started working with the gourds that way. I thought I was inventing the wheel," he adds with a laugh. "Then I discovered the Internet and found out, 'Hey, gourds are a big thing!'"
In New Mexico, his subject matter became deeply inspired by his new neighbors — well, the dead ones, actually. The ancient Mimbres people, called the Mimbre_o, who lived along the nearby Mimbres River, impressed Nichols deeply. He came to study their designs, their lives, and felt compelled to bring their images inscribed on pots back into view.
His art these days, like the work showcased on this issue's cover, consists mainly of turning the dried shell of a fruit in the Cucurbitaceae family of plants — a gourd — into a piece of art that could pass for an ancient pot. Or a mask. Or a very strange animal.
Nichols' gourd art has been in numerous juried shows. His work will be shown in a show this July in Ruidoso, and he hopes to get into a Tucson Museum show in August. His work is currently shown in the Running Horse Gallery in Glenwood. And he will have a one-man show at the Mimbres Region Arts Council's gallery in Silver City from April into June, with an opening reception April 3.
Describing his creative process, Nichols says, "Growing is the very first step of the process." Many of his pieces are made from gourds he grew himself. He shuffles around a few of the specimens on his studio worktable. "These I imported," he says, pointing out a few of the larger bell-shaped gourds, a couple of them 18 to 24 inches in diameter and sitting nearly two feet tall. He caresses the dried vegetable's pale golden exterior. "I've never been able to grow them this big."
Whether grown in Nichols' own garden or procured, the gourds next must be allowed to dry and then cleaned, he says. Their outer skins need to be prepared for finishing, so that they will take ink and paint.
"Then I just look at them to figure out, 'What does the gourd say?' I have to figure out what images to put on them, and the shape and surface hold the key to that," he says. He picks up a huge gourd, still in the rough.
"Oh, this one has a great shape," Nichols exclaims. He runs his hand over the outside. "See this mottled surface? This one will make a great pot!"
Next he draws in his designs, in pencil. These lines are then burned into the surface with a special tool.
"I go back in and round these corners to give them age," he says, showing how a gourd in the process of becoming a replica of an ancient Mimbres pot looks more like pottery than vegetable matter. "Sometimes I break out a piece, a sherd if it was actual pottery, and glue it back in. But not quite perfectly. See that one?" he asks, pointing out a chip just faintly askew.
To make a gourd-cum-pot more like a pouring or cooking vessel, Nichols sometimes fashions a handle out of wood and attaches it.
"Then several layers of paint are brushed on, not sprayed," he says. "It gives a better, more authentic finish." Finally, the designs are inked onto the piece, in black.
Though the images on most of his gourd pieces are variations of the Mimbres people's artwork — primitive human and animal figures, celestial bodies and mythological symbols — the pieces do vary in form as to what they become. Most are vessels: pots and bowls with stories told in pictures on the inside or outside. But there are also masks and even some gourds made into whimsical animals.
One mask hanging on the studio wall has arms of plastic cacti standing in for horns. Nichols gestures to another piece of gourd art on a nearby table, this one in the form of an animal of some sort.
"I don't even know what this is!" he says with a laugh. "Some kind of creature. It's fun, though, isn't it?"
Fun, it is. Looking almost like a cat crossed with, well, maybe an alligator, the critter gazes upward with a happy look on its face, sporting a whimsical, thick tail, its legs comically splayed.
He points out another "character" piece, this one a comical bird made from two gourds. Its banana-like beak is fashioned from the long neck of a bulbous gourd. Fish, primitive people, birds and symbols are inked around its rotund belly and around the back of the creature's bizarre cranium.
"That's the Moon Bird," says Nichols, as he pulls out a small book. "I wrote these, 'imaginative stories' I call them, to tell the tales behind the images." He reads the two short pages that tell the story of a mythical bird that comes each night to protect the children and their village. In the tale, two mischievous boys plan to trap the bird but, as in all morality tales, they suffer bad consequences for their actions.
He flips a few pages, then reads the short story he penned about the Creation Bowl: "Long time ago, before all else had ever begun, the world was empty, much like a night sky without moon or stars." He goes on to tell the tale — his own imagined story — about the Great Creator Spirit who made all creatures in a huge, mystical bowl, then poked a hole in the bottom of the vessel to send them into the world. But the little people and creatures did not want to go; they clung to the rim of the hole.
The creator, however, convinced them that they could return to him later, thereby encouraging them to let go and to live their lives in the river valley. They would be able to return through a hole in their own bowls. In fact, many bowls of the Mimbres people, found buried with their bodies, have holes punctured in the dead center of their bottom. Archeologists posit that this hole — called a "kill" or a "spirit hole" — was put there to allow the deceased ones' souls to return to the Great Spirit.
Nichols finishes reading his story about the Creation Bowl, then points out his own gourd creation bedecked with the ancient symbols hanging on his studio wall.
"No other culture put pictures of themselves on their pottery," he says, wistfully fingering the edge of the bowl, delicately touching the spirit hole punched in the bottom. "These people were unique in that, and it says something about them. I don't know; it makes me feel something very special about them.
"So much about these people was lost. We have a few sherds of their pottery, some of their images. The archeologists can only surmise," he says. "That's a big reward of my work, that in creating something with the feel of their work, working with their images, in a way I bring something back to life."
Pierre Nichols' gourd art can be seen at Running Horse Gallery in Glenwood. An exhibit of his work will be held at the Mimbres Region Arts Council's gallery in the Wells Fargo Bank Building in Silver City, with an opening reception April 3. For more about the artist, see www.artisticgourds.com or call 538-2505.