Bride Webb
Grants, NM

Looking at the items sent, our (me and everyone around me) main inspirations seemed to come from the little white jewels. There were thoughts to use them as flower petals, dew drops, even as jewels! Anyway, after considering several very nice ideas, I remembered seeing pictures of Saguaro Cacti in bloom and their petals look very much like the little jewels and birds often make holes for nests in the protecting Saguaro. But, did parrots?

In many of the old pueblo stories a traveler named Kokopeli (also known as The Flute Player) went from pueblo to pueblo with a parrot on his shoulder, sowing his seeds. He was a welcome fertility symbol for the crops and the people. The parrots, and their colorful feathers were valuable trade items in the southwest.

In this piece I also had the restriction that I could use only supplies and glass that I already had on-hand. Luckily I had two little beveled mirrors that were very close in size to the two sent. At first I was going to use them as "tinajas" pools of rainwater caught in depressions in the sandstones. But I couldn't find the perfect piece of glass to create that illusion. So they became elements of the sun symbol frame. The parrot sits coolly in the saguaro nest amidst other flowering saguaro.

The glass is a combination of Spectrum, Bullseye, Kokomo, Armstrong and some that I created in the kiln myself. It was difficult to find sky and mountain colors that mimicked the bright and vibrant colors so common here. So often people think of the desert as being colorless and lifeless, far from it.