We’ve spent the last week exploring monochromatic color themes, neutral tones and black and white. Today, with our last entry for this edition of our Wednesday/Weekend series highlighting Wings’s current body of work, we take those themes and branch out a bit, in a couple of ways.
When I do these three-post series, it’s rare that each post involves the same sort of work — that is to say, most of the time, each post will highlight work from a different gallery, different forms of jewelry (or collectibles). This week, all three entries feature bracelets, and all three are cuff bracelets, albeit in varying styles using different stones. But today’s is a bit different from the other two, in that it is expressly something made for a small person: a child’s cuff.
In our cultures, this is not unusual, and I’ve written about this phenomenon here before:
It’s not uncommon in indigenous cultures to see very young children wearing jewelry, and not the plastic costume jewelry found in the outside world, either. No, this is the real thing, of the same materials and same value as that worn by their elders, simply writ small for tiny ears and necks and hands and wrists. Most little girls (and some little boys) I know have their ears pierced in infancy, and grow up wearing earrings of precious metal and genuine gemstones, albeit tiny versions that are age-appropriate and unlikely to get caught and cause injury during play. Many also wear modest chain or bead necklaces and slender cuff bracelets, sized to scale for little bodies.
But there comes a point where it’s time for children to have their own fully adult jewelry. In some instances, it’s amore formalized event, carrying specific meaning and perhaps recognition of new status. For others, it simply occurs organically, and is nothing especially remarkable from a cultural standpoint, but it’s a crossing of a threshold of sorts nonetheless.
This is one of the reasons why Wings occasionally buys jewelry items made by child artisans: It recognizes their status as fully actualized members of their culture, and at the same time, it encourages them in their art, and in the prospect of carrying on their people’s traditions. It’s also why he occasionally makes pieces that are sized specifically for children.
In the case of today’s featured piece, it’s one that evokes the monochromatic look of the works we highlighted yesterday and Wednesday, but one with an added dash of brilliant color, as befits childhood. The imagery is likewise powerful, incorporating symbolism generally regarded as adult in nature and purpose, but that can easily be conceived as protective for small spirits.
The center stone appears, at first glance, to be black and white, although it’s really more of a dark translucent brown topped with patchy white inclusions.Some obsidian truly is pitch-black, if not at all opaque, but much of what in natural light appears to black obsidian is actually dark brown; hold it up to the light, and it looks like the color of root beer. one example of this is the type of obsidian known as Apache tears. How that name came to be is a touching and tragic story in itself, one that, indirectly, demonstrates the lengths to which indigenous peoples will go to preserve their children’s legacies. I’ve written about it elsewhere, in the context of what is proving to be a modern colonial tragedy (and crime) of another kind:
Welcome to Apache Leap. The elders tell of a time when invading U.S. soldiers sought to abduct the Apache people, herd them onto reservations, and steal their land. The people fought valiantly, but were woefully outnumbered. When the end came, the Apache warriors chose to retain their honor rather than surrender to thieves and thugs: They leapt off the peak to their deaths below, joining the spirits of their ancestors and depriving the Army of prize captives.
At the base of the formation, a nearly-translucent brown-black obsidian is found. The stones are called Apache tears, and as the story goes, when the surviving women found the bodies of their men at the base of the leap, they mourned so deeply and bitterly that Spirit turned their tears to beautifully, lethally sharp stone, so that no one would forget the crime against the people that had happened in that place.
The story may seem to outsiders to be one that is inappropriate for children. To the contrary, it is, like so many of our peoples’ stories, one that shows them their real history, their real legacy, instills in them the knowledge of their ancestors’ warrior spirits and of their own ability to stand strong for their people.
Today’s featured piece, of course, is not made with Apache tears, nor tears of any other kind, but it is made with a form of obsidian. In this case, it’s snowflake obsidian, a stone that we’ve covered here in our Tuesday series on Jewels and Gems. The look of the stone gives it its name, and that combined with the stones inherent volcanic glassine nature evokes elemental dichotomies of fire and ice (and, indeed, Wings has created a two-piece collection in miniature, each piece made with snowflake obsidian, with the very name Fire and Ice).
Today’s work utilizes the same stone, but not in isolation. The snowflake obsidian center cabochon is flanked by smaller round cabochons of lapis in bright blue, almost cobalt in color. For Wings’s people, it’s the color of the waters sacred to their tradition. From the cuff’s description in the Bracelets Gallery:
Snowflakes Child’s Cuff Bracelet
In traditional cultures, the children wear traditional dress, right down to the jewelry, designed and sized just for them, but made in the styles their elders wear. This little cuff is a perfect example, one that embodies the energy and spontaneity and excitement of childhood balanced and tempered by calming protective influences. Made of sterling silver half-round wire, the band neither given neither an aged patina nor a mirror finish, buffed just enough to make it smooth against the skin. At its center rest three small bezel-set stones: an oval cabochon of snowflake obsidian, where the extremes of hot and cold meet and meld, flanked on either side by tiny round stones of soothing lapis lazuli.
Sterling silver, snowflake obsidian, lapis lazuli
$135 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It is, very much, a fully realized work of wearable art in miniature form. For indigenous children, this is the way of things, a sartorial rite of passage weighted with deeper meaning than mere fashion. It’s a way to teach responsibility, to inculcate an awareness of the need to protect what is of value: in material terms, with tangible items of traditional dress, markers of status as a member of the people; and in metaphorical terms, as the recipient of a long and time-honored history, identity, and tradition.
It’s a way of living, of being, of bringing up the next generation that the world would perhaps do well to emulate. After all, it is the children who will carry what is of value into this world’s future.
~ 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.
