For the most part, Nampeyo retained the techniques she had learned in her youth. Her earthenware pots, coiled rather than thrown, were coated in a thin white kaolin slip, which she calibrated to the clay body to avoid surface cracking. Once it was fired, she decorated the pot using mineral pigments, in a visual language of her own creation. Nampeyo borrowed motifs from those she saw on Sikyátki shards and from other contemporaneous Pueblo potters such as the Zuni. Over time, her compositions departed from the interlocking geometries conventional to the tradition. She placed stylized bird forms
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