Look overhead.
What do you see?
Most of our days are spent looking at the sky only at eye level — a horizontal swath of blue (or, on a cloudy day, gray), one that we take for granted as all-encompassing even though only a narrow rectangle penetrates our worldview. But our world is far greater, grander, more vast than that, with a vaulted ceiling that fans out above us like a protective blue shell made of water and light.
It is that feeling, of living safe within the embrace of just such a shell, jeweled and webbed like stained glass set with bits of pearlescent blue, that infuses Wings’s latest masterwork.
Its title honors two traditional motifs, both of which are linked together by ties of long standing and a common name: the fan shell. One of the colloquial names for the scallop shell, which is common to my own people’s lands along the Great Lakes, is the fan shell — a reference to its ridged and rounded arc above a squared base. Some indigenous peoples use such shells in jewelry and other ornamentation, as well as in the contexts of medicine and ceremony. Among others of our peoples, fan shells refer to dentalium and other shells that are used, quite literally, in making traditional fans. Both usages are thoroughly indigenous, ancient aspects of equally ancient traditional cultures. Both find themselves reimagined and reinterpreted in today’s featured work, one that embodies the vast sky of this land at the same time that it echoes the voices of the shell spirits that the earth here still occasionally turns up, a gift of a more ancient time. From its description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Fan Shell Sky Cuff Bracelet
At Taos Pueblo, the turquoise sky fans out overhead like a heavenly shell, stretching to the corners of the world above above an arc of silver light. Wings captures its ethereal beauty and celestial dance in a masterwork that evokes the very old, classic, traditional style if his ancestors, reimagined for a new day. The cuff begins with heavy fourteen-gauge silver, solid and substantial. He scored it freehand into ten separate rows, evoking both the Pueblo’s otherworldly light and the silvery rains that sustain it. He then chose a magnificent spiderweb turquoise cabochon of incredible size, a stone from the Cloud Mountain Mine of China’s Hubei District, which produces stone of a beauty and quality to rival that of America’s best mines. He turned the fan-shaped cabochon on its side and set it in a scalloped bezel, accented on one angled side by a single tiny piece of the Arizona sky, bright blue Sleeping Beauty turquoise. He then inserted a tiny columnar tube of sterling silver atop the cuff to create a slightly elevated mounting and and set the bezel atop it, giving it just enough clearance to permit easy and safe adjustment of the band. The band itself is 1-3/8″ inches across; the focal cabochon is 1.75″ at its longest point by 1-3/8″ across at its widest point; the accent cab is 3/16″ across (dimensions approximate). Other views shown above and at the link.
Sterling silver; Cloud Mountain turquoise; Sleeping Beauty turquoise
$3,200 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Note: Insurance costs will be substantially higher for a work of this weight and value
It’s rare for Wings to use Chinese turquoise, although it’s extraordinarily common to find it in contemporary Native jewelry. There was a time, and not long ago, when Chinese turquoise was widely regarded as inferior in every way: cheap, chalky, chemically treated. That is still the case with much of it that is mass-produced, but that doesn’t differ in any significant way from a lot of mass-produced American turquoise, either. Here in this country, a lot of the bright sky-blue turquoise seen everywhere comes from Arizona’s Kingman district, and is wholly unsuited to gemwork in its natural state. The miners recover all of the chalk turquoise, the dust and detritus, and seal it into blocks that can then be cut, cabbed, and sold in a form that is stable enough for jewelry. It’s not high-value, but it’s beautiful, and the mining company is very clear about how it’s treated. Chinese companies treat their low-grade turquoise in similar fashion.
But there are a couple of districts in the mountainous regions of central and eastern China that, in the last few years, have begun producing truly extraordinary turquoise for the world market. This is the turquoise that rivals most of what the U.S. can offer, in appearance and quality alike: hard, high-value stone in a brilliant range of intense blues and greens, often with a tight dark spiderweb matrix that produces an effect much like that of old leaded stained glass windows. Wings has come into possession of a few such cabochons, each of extraordinary size and quality. Today’s work features the first.
This is one of those rare pieces that I find myself actually coveting personally. I doubt he’s ever made a piece that I didn’t love, and that I wouldn’t gladly wear, but there are some that speak directly to my spirit. This is one such.
But I live daily beneath a fan shell sky; I need only look up to feel its embrace. This miniature sky is meant for someone who is perhaps not so fortunate — who needs to be able to wear a piece of such a sky in order to keep its spirit close.
~ 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.
