Vine deLoria has said that God is Red. In our world, so, too, is Father Sun — a wholly Native spirit who dances across our skies.
It’s easy to believe in him as a tangible being on mornings like this one, when the dawn sets the sky on fire.
It’s fitting that this should be the season when the sunrise is at its most brilliant, most intense, most filled with tempestuous color. It is, after all, the most quintessential Native season: a time when Summer’s brief return is named for our people, yet Autumn has already arrived and rests comfortably in place; a time of harvest of the Three Sisters who have sustained our peoples since before time itself dawned; a time of Indian corn and pumpkins and flame-colored leaves eddying on the winds, a last spiral of color before the snow flies.
With today’s all-new work, Wings brings it all together in a pair of truly classic earrings, traditional in form but with his unique imprimatur, both literally and figuratively. From their description in the Earrings Gallery here on the site:
In our world, Father Sun is red. Wings captures his image in its purest form, two perfect garnet spheres of deepest scarlet placed at the center of a silvery sky. The earrings themselves are perfect circles of solid silver, lightly domed, repoussé-fashion, into traditional conchas. On the convex side, each garnet opens into concentric orbits of hand-stamped rays, each created by melding and linking traditional symbols in a revolving cycle: a starburst ringed by whirling spirals of stardust, each ray ending in a flared spoke of the sunrise itself. On the reverse, Wings’s hallmark rests in a guiding star set to ordinal points, each spoke carried by a tiny butterfly to the edges of the dawn. Earrings are 1.25 inches across. Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver; garnet
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
These are times when Wings brings together shape and symbol, substance and spirit, in a way that is as close to perfection as freehand work gets. This is one. The stampwork is extraordinarily fine, meticulously detailed, evenly applied. The melding of symbols explodes into an image far greater than the sum of its parts, blossoming into rays of silvery light from the central spirit that guides our days.
It’s a work for this day, and for this season, and for the season of prophecy yet to come, a return to our own world where Father Sun is Red.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
