In this week’s edition of our ongoing Wednesday/Weekend series highlighting Wings’s own work, we’ve been exploring how earth and water and sky come together in silver and stone and symbolism. Our first two entries for the work have featured brand new works, pieces built around Skystones of extraordinary quality and appearance.
Today, we bring the imagery home: literally, in a very tangibly expressive way, a manifestation of the symbol and spirit in a piece that is a part of one of Wings’s signature series.
It’s an existing piece, one that he originally created as part of the silverwork component of his one-man show last year. Throughout his exhibition, he explored the ancestral places and sacred spaces of his home, from walls and windows to peaks and ladders to the skies, micro and macro and all the spaces between, from a vantage point otherwise wholly unavailable to the viewer.
The show as whole, and this small work in particular, brought it all together: earth and water and sky, the substance and spirit of the Pueblo itself, rendered in fire-tempered silver accented with the people’s own Skystone. From its description in the Pins Gallery:
For more than a decade, Wings has paid tribute to the mud and vigas that make the village’s ancient homes with his signature series of Pueblo pins in the style of the Pueblo’s iconic architecture. Each pin is unique, yet each features the adobe walls and open windows, the hand-made pine vigas and traditional ladders, all manifested in sterling silver. Here, the ajouré pin with its meticulously-detailed stampwork is accented by a tiny turquoise cabochon: a deep robin’s-egg blue aswirl with an inky matrix, the color of the stormclouds that cool the dry village walls with much-needed rain.
Sterling silver; blue turquoise
$325 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Over the years, he has created dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Pueblo pins as a part of this signature series. Each is unique, drawn, cut, and stamped by hand, all thematically similar but with differences in the details as discreetly discrete as the windows and doors, the vigas and ladders, of the individual homes it embodies. I’ve long since lost count of the number of such pins that he has accented with turquoise (although he calls upon a broad range of jewels and gems). But this stone, the one chosen for this entry in his show, was different.
Small turquoise cabochons of this size are produced in calibrated bulk, normally of Kingman or Sleeping Beauty turquoise. As a result, there is rarely any visible matrix; their surface is generally an unremitting blue, on a short spectrum between robin’s egg and sky. This one was unique among its peers, with tiny whorls of matrix visible to the naked eye — in a dark and inky purple. It rendered the blue itself more complex, faint and subtle shades of blues and greens swirled together in a tiny vortex, as though it were the embodiment of all the shades of the Skystone pulled into a whirlwind, a distillation of the earth and water and sky at its infinite point.
It’s a small, subtle, unobtrusive piece, neither brash nor especially showy. But it captures the power of natural forces harnessed to create protection and shelter. It embodies the strength of the Pueblo itself: the earth and water mixed into bricks and mortar, dried in the sun and warm air, fitted together meticulously to create a permanent home, a tangible, elemental foundation for the people.
That’s real power.
~ 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.
