Mirroring

This tiny beaded bag - which accompanies a 'doll', or, more accurately, a small 'soft sculpture' - is decorated with double cones that symbolizes the concept of mirroring: what is above is below. 

Award-winning Assiniboine-Sioux artist Juanita Growing Thunder explains, "The reflected doubles symbolize the earth world and the spirit world." Mirrored images often reference the meeting of the sky world (or the spiritual) and the earth world (or the daily) and the intermixing of these two worlds.

Growing Thunder stated that these images are "a reminder that you are supposed to live within both."

Images and quotes from: Grand Procession: Contemporary Artistic Visions of American Indians. By Lois Sherr Dubin. Denver: Denver Museum of Art, 2010. 64 pp. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 cloth.