We have spent the week just past looking at Wings’s work through oppositional lenses: dichotomous elements colliding, clashing, merging, melding, motifs that, once joined create a more complex and powerful symbolism than the mere sum of their parts. It’s been a view mediated, at its threshold, by weather and season, but one that extends into widely disparate aspects of life.
Until now, that view has been informed by our bitter cold here, harsh bright sun and razor-sharp winds working in opposition to each other. Today, we are the beneficiaries of a fast-moving warming trend, one that began yesterday and by mid-week will reach unseasonal highs more associated with April than with February.
The milder air and this morning’s softer skies, a paler blue touched here and there by wisps of thin but low-hanging gray clouds, put me in mind of today’s featured work, a pair of earrings that are equally elemental in motif and seem the very embodiment of our dawn sky on this day. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
Warm Blue Rain Earrings
The earthy fire of hematite warms these large smooth drops of the Skystone, fallen rain solidified into another precious form. The stones are set into sterling silver bezels hand-stamped on the reverse in flowing, feminine designs reminiscent of traditional pottery and basketry patterns, then suspended from hand-made sterling silver wires. Earrings hang 1-5/16″ below wires (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; natural blue turquoise
$425 + shipping, handling, and insurance
SOLD
Earrings coordinate with A Little Jar of Rain necklace and Cloudburst earrings.
The other two works that Wings created as a part of this collection in miniature have long since sold, but this pair of earrings remains. As we head into the season that one significant population among the dominant culture recognizes as Lent, they remind me too of Easter eggs: perfect ovoid forms, smooth and slightly glossy, dyed the color of the heavens as they move from winter into the early days of spring. Today feels like just such a day, when the pale blue of the sky no longer feels cold, but rather, like a thin warming blanket, all soft surfaces and rounded edges. The hematite cabochons at the top pick up the wispy bits of pyrite matrix in the stones, like the clouds out the window that hold the promise of rain — just out of reach for now, but sure to visit the land in the weeks to come.
Today’s work is, fundamentally, a work of hope and promise, of the world’s cyclical nature and its inherent ability to harness and synthesize the elements in way that sustains life. It is not, of course, a pledge of cheap and empty words; it’s one that requires work on our part. But it holds out more than hope: the promise that, at the end of one season, the gift of abundance will be sufficient for the next.
That’s a promise worth helping the world to keep.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2016; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
