About The Artwork
The four directions are among the most widely held design principles in Native American culture and art. The form is typically a circle quartered into four, sometimes called a medicine wheel, and it organizes far more than geography. Across many nations, the four carry the seasons, the stages of a human life, the elements, and the animals or ancestors who keep each direction.
Colors, sequence, and the beings assigned to each direction differ from nation to nation and are often held as teachings rather than public information. What holds across traditions is the structure itself: four in balance, bound by a circle, with the center as the place where they meet.
Rendered here in carved horn, the design leaves the flat plane it usually occupies. The circle wraps the curve of the horn, so no single view gives you the whole. You have to move around it. The four reveal themselves in sequence, which is, arguably, how they were always meant to be encountered.
