A few days ago, I promised elsewhere that we would be bringing you four new pieces this week, all in the same category . . . and all at a positive steal of a price point. We begin with the first today; the remaining three will appear during our Wednesday/Weekend features of Wings’s work for the upcoming week. (I may also take the unusual step of posting two features in one day later this week, but that depends upon whether and when his latest work is completed. Fair warning: It will not be in this same category, in either style or cost, but it will be breathtaking.)
This series is a bit of a departure for Wings, whose focus is usually more on the silverwork than on the stones, except in the context of the larger piece. Until the last year or two, he’s relied on a pair of artisans from Kewa Pueblo for most of the beadwork he incorporates into his necklace pieces (and for the beadwork that we sold independently in the gallery), but he’s become increasingly hands-on in all aspects of design over the last couple of years, and has mostly switched to doing his own, as can be seen from the many examples now in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site. He will sometimes ask me to assist him in choosing beads for a given work; my particular set of visual skills with regard to color and texture are helpful in combining synthesizing color and media to create the overall design he wants to achieve.
A couple of weeks ago, some friends dropped by unexpectedly, a fellow Native artist and his wife in town for the feast days, and they happened to notice the one last coil bracelet in stock at that time — one of the four or five remaining pieces of Kewa beadwork in our inventory. They were interested in it . . . until they learned that it was not by Wings himself. Recounting it to him later, I suggested that he should make a few himself; he had, after all, just remarked on the fact that he has an enormous diversity of beads in his inventory of supplies, some of them in quantities and shapes and sizes and materials not especially suited to his larger, more formal works. He asked me to work with him on choosing color ad texture combinations and laying out patterns, which I did; with them, he created four brand-new works.
The pieces featured today, this coming Wednesday, and next Saturday and Sunday are the result.
For today, we begin with the first of the four, one that echoes the warm earthy colors that have marked the posts of the week just past, and evokes some of the small spirits whose equally modest cousins have likewise put in an appearance here lately. From its description in the Bracelets Gallery:
Cowrie Coil Bracelet
Native peoples all over Turtle Island historically used shells for trade and commerce, for prophecy and medicine, from wampum in the Northeastern Algonquin lands to heishi here in the desert Southwest. Wings pays tribute to the spiraled beauty of the spirits from which they came in this coiled bracelet named for the sacred cowrie and made from local olivella shell. Sterling silver “memory wire” is strung with more than one hundred traditional beads of heishi in a gradient of sizes and warm earthy colors, white and gold and russet and brown, separated by old-style bronze cone beads. Two lightly polished nuggets of abalone shell are strung a third of the way from either end; a large thick teardrop of abalone marks the center. Four elastic coils stretch to fit nearly any wrist. Joint design by Wings and Aji.
Sterling silver; olivella-shell heishi, bronze beads, abalone beads
$225 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Shells of all sorts have been used by our peoples since the dawn of time: as adornment; as art; as units of trade; as a means of recording history and transmitting messages; as forms of medicine and spiritual aid; for my own people, as an object of prophecy and navigational guide. Whereas heishi is a traditional medium for jewelry in this part of Indian Country, to points North And East, the shells of the cowrie and the whelk hold pride of place. What our Algonquin peoples call wampum comes from the whelk; the cowrie plays numerous roles, sacred ones among them.
Cowrie shells were common in the lands of my childhood. Unlike many snail shells, they do not manifest in the spiral shape we associate with the more common garden and sea snails whose shells mimic their endangered cousin, the nautilus, except, of course, for the tiny coiled effect at the end cone. They do, however, appear in a stunning array of colors and patterns within a spectrum that runs from white to deepest brown, spots and lines and spiraling bands across the shell’s surface. And when my own family migrated to this desert land years ago, I found them here, as well.
People don’t think of the desert Southwest as a place where seashells occur naturally, but it is. There are reasons that the peoples of this place have always traditionally used coral and heishi that have nothing to do with trade: After all, in the time before time, this entire land was covered with water — our canyons and hoodoos are Nature’s own art, sculptures effected by the flow of water over time on an epic (and epochal) scale. South of here, in the Guadalupe Mountains near New Mexico’s borders with Texas and Mexico, there is an enormous fossilized reef in the middle of the desert: a shell mound of truly ancient vintage, memorialized now in the desert sand and rock. There are other such formations stretching westward across the state. While today most shell used in art and adornment is acquired via modern forms of trade, in the old days, these once-living jewels could be extracted from the earth of this land itself.
And so, Wings has chosen to honor those ancient spirits, and with them ancient ways: in a coiling spiral of beauty and value, of art and language, of medicine and the sacred — brought together in a vortex of power that spins across a spectrum of traditions in substance and spirit from one end of Turtle Island to the other.
~ 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.
