Pair of Peruvian Shipibo Pottery Stacking Bowls with Faces - reserved for SS

I just love this pair of Shipibo pottery bowls, each with a Janus-like pair of faces, one on either side. Very thin-walled, made of earthenware shaped by coil construction, and hand-painted with wonderful all-over maze-like geometric patterns, these are quintessential examples of pottery made by the women of the Shipibo, an Indigenous people who live along the Ucayali River in the Amazon rainforest in Peru.   Apparently, the patterns reference the Shipibo belief that "in mythic times geometric designs covered everything—the sky, trees, people, animals, et cetera—but due to the misdeeds of failed protohumans... the geometric lineaments ruptured." As such, it is understood that "all of the designs are pre-existent; the artist has only to grasp and fix them in her mind lay them over the design field, and cut where they match that field, letting the rest of the design fade back into invisibility. The visible design remains as a window into the vast reticulate intricacy of the universe."* W