Ohoyo Osh Chishba (Unknown Woman)

Pit fired ceramic, ochres and terra sigillata. 14", 2026.

One of the Choctaw stories tells of a mysterious woman who appeared to two hunters one night. She was on a sacred mound. She asked for food, and the hunters gave her the hawk they had caught. To thank them, she told them to return next summer. When they did, there was corn growing.

This piece is intended to mimic the seed vessels created to store seeds for the next harvest. It is shaped like a corn kernel, and when I put her in the pit fire, I wrapped her in corn husks, and fillled the interior with corn husks.

Juliette Morris Williams (goes by Juliette Morris) is a multidisciplinary artist working in figurative sculpture, masks, and painting using handmade pigments, natural fibers, and clay. A registered Choctaw artist, her practice explores identity, memory, and ancestral knowledge through material processes rooted in Indigenous traditions and relationships to land. Her work centers on reclaiming cultural memory through embodied making and material transformation.

In 2024, she was a Fellow with the First Peoples Fund, and created the series ‘Mujeres Divinas: Indigenous Women of the Americas’. Along with numerous sculptures honoring indigenous women who have done a great deal for their communities, there are a series of ancestor masks accompanying them.

Currently she is working on a series entitled ‘Toba’, which loosely translates ‘to become’.