Sue and Tom Tapia, who are from Laguna and San Juan, respectively, work as a husband and wife pottery team. Sue coils, carves, and polishes the pot, while Tom does the masterful incising decorations. Because of the tremendous amount of detailed complexity to their work - some pieces take more than a month to create.
Tom has created his own unique style of sgraffito, where he etches the surface area to reveal a reddish/orange background to his clean traditional designs. The natural clays that they use are dug on tribal lands. Their pots are hand coiled, then sanded, and then fired using the traditional open-air technique.
They use wood and manure to fuel the fire. As the manure smolders, their pots turn black. Sue and Tom have been winning awards at various shows and exhibits since 1994. Their work is always unique, traditional and very precise.
Purchased from the artists at Santa Fe Indian Market.