Queen, Joel
“Stone and wood speak to me in a visual picture and then I carve that image. Ceramics binds my images to the functional world.”
Born in 1967, Joel Queen counts himself a ninth-generation Cherokee potter. He traces his lineage through the Bigmeat family of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. His mother was Ethel Bigmeat Queen, his grandmother Charlotte Welch Bigmeat. For generations the Bigmeat family name has been synonymous with high-quality Cherokee pottery.
Joel’s interest in traditional Cherokee art was sparked by one of his high school instructors. She encouraged him to look into silversmithing, painting, sculpture and leatherwork. The making of Cherokee pottery was almost a dead craft when he started looking into it. And similarly to the Southwest Pueblos, the craft of making pottery had long been passed from grandmother and mother to daughter, hardly ever to son.
As much as Joel’s pottery has earned him the most acclaim, Joel is also a sculptor and wood carver. He says he hasn’t yet found a medium that he couldn’t work in. The first piece of stone he carved he sold for $250. That was enough to get him hooked on producing artwork for a living. “The simplicity of line is what I look for,” he says, “and line is what I manipulate. Stone and wood speak to me in a visual picture and then I carve that image. Ceramics binds my images to the functional world.”
Joel was among a small group of Cherokee potters who worked to revive Cherokee stamped pottery in the spring of 2002. Stamped pottery is a tradition that goes back thousands of years. The pots are hand-coiled, burnished and, using methods that make them waterproof, fired in an open pit at a high temperature. When finished, they can be used for cooking outdoors over an open fire. However, the use of pottery for cooking purposes faded out in the late 1800s. That’s when the decorations came to the fore: traditional Cherokee pottery morphed into Cherokee ceramic artwork.
Cherokee potters still make storage vessels, bowls, cooking pots, lamps and funeral urns but they tend to be highly decorated. Joel uses his own hand-carved tools and stamps in making his pottery. He likes to incise his pots with both traditional and contemporary designs, sometimes adding pieces of turquoise or coral to the design.
Old Qualla-style pottery (the Qualla Boundary is land held in trust by the US Government for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians) is thin-walled with a conical base, beige and black coloring, and shallow, crisscrossed indentations. Joel prefers to make large, thick-walled, hand-coiled pots that he can engrave his designs in, or add appliqués to.
Some of Joel’s engravings look like doodles, others incorporate ages-old symbols in them (like the human hand and the spiral) while other pieces are engraved with designs of birds, turtles and other animals. His favorite appliqués seem to be sculpted ears of corn.
The most important part of the pottery-making process is the firing. Joel likes to use a smoky firing to put fire clouds into the clay and to enhance the natural clay colors. He usually fires his blackware twice: once over a pine and manure fire, then a second time in an oxygen-reduction atmosphere to turn the clay black.
Joel participated in the Santa Fe Indian Market for a number of years, often winning blue ribbons for his pieces.