The personalities of stones guide Hopi jeweler Sonwai, Verma Nequatewa to create her award-winning designs.
Nequatewa, the featured artists at the Museum of Northern Arizona’s 2004 Hopi Marketplace, says, “Often, it is the stones that tell me what to do with the inlay. I work with them to help them become what they can be. When it is done, I feel sort of like I am releasing a child into the world to go on and create happiness in others.”
Nequatewa’s bold yet delicate pieces reflect her life growing up on the Hopi reservation in northeastern Arizona, where she apprenticed with her uncle and renowned jeweler, Charles Loloma. Under Loloma’s encouragement, Nequatewa adopted the working name, Sonwai, the feminine counterpart to loloma meaning beautiful in Hopi. She uses gold, silver, turquoise, lapis lazuli, ivory, wood, and opals in her work. She says it was difficult finding her own style after working with Loloma for twenty-three years, yet a distinctive Sonwai aesthetic has emerged.
“Charles taught that beauty is all around us on Hopi, in the environment, in the culture, in ceremony,” she says. “By combining elements from what is a part of my everyday life, with the finest of ideas and the finest of materials, I can interpret a part of Hopi for people to see and wear. Whenever I can, I like to develop a piece for a special person. That way, I can make the interpretation, the message, even more appropriate and specific. This then goes back and forth between Hopi culture, my input, the wearer and those who see the piece. Good feeling, smiles, and happiness are the result.”