In our current Wednesday/Weekend series highlighting small collections of Wings’s work built around common themes, we’ve been exploring a tripartite group of motifs, of common threads: one physical, one numerical, one metaphorical. Today’s featured item incorporates all three in one beautiful simple piece.
The physical thread is perhaps the most obvious, particularly for those who’ve been following these weekly series. There is one clear and substantial difference between these collections in miniature that we’ve featured in previous weeks, and it’s one that carries its own layers of symbol and metaphor. I refer, of course, to the fact that each of these pieces is solid and unadorned silver: silversmithing in its pure form, unaccented by gemstones or even by any real stampwork. Each of these pieces bespeaks a sort of purity, not in any moralistic sense, but in terms of stripping away extraneous detail, focusing on the essence of each piece. It imbues each with a sense of power that is quieter, perhaps, than that which inhabits more complex pieces, but that in a way seems to be more fundamental to the work itself, too.
The numeric thread is also fairly obvious: We’ve been talking in terms of tributaries, a word whose opening syllable tri- would seem to hark back to the same root that evokes the numerical imagery of the number three. It doesn’t, of course; “tributary” has its roots in the word “tribute,” which itself derives ultimately from the word “tribe” — perhaps apt in other ways for work created by a Native artist, but that’s a tributary divergent from this one. The numerical symbolism is undeniable, though, in the three pieces we’ve highlighted this week. Each cuff featured previously, like today’s ring, is formed of a single length and width of sterling silver, given form and shape under Wings’s hands in a way that clearly delineates a trio of discrete lines: the first cuff, of a high central line flanked by two smooth flat ones; the second, of another central peak edged by two smaller peaks; and the ring, a wide smooth segment whose only accent is composed of two slender scored lines, one at either edge. It is that last, a new piece, that we show you here today. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site:
The Rivers Ring
Water is life in this desert place, and it is the rivers and streams that daily feed this land, and therefore us. This simple silver band embodies the three rivers that are the lifeblood of the Pueblo lands: the Rio Pueblo and the Rio Lucero, both feeding ultimately into the gleaming silver waters of the great Rio Grande. The band, unadorned by anything but the shimmery surface, is scored by hand on either side, making visible the smaller tributaries that merge with the great flow of the main waters. Sizeable. Another view shown below.
Sterling silver
$275 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Which brings us, of course, to the third and final thread woven through this week’s collection: the metaphorical one. It’s water — peculiarly apt this time of year, as we ready the land for irrigation preparatory to the planting season now looming just ahead. It’s also present in our consciousness in the form of the increased flow in the rivers and streams, the time when (save for flash-flood conditions during late-summer monsoons) the water level is at its highest and it races downstream with the greatest speed and force.
There are multiple rivers in this area, a cardiovascular system of this land composed of arteries and veins and capillaries in the form of rivers and tributaries and streams that range from creeks and brooks to the local acequias to simple hand-dug ditches a few inches deep, sometimes called canales here but more properly conceived as shallow, narrow depressions in the soil than as anything approaching an actual canal. In one way or another, everything feeds, and is fed by, the Rio Grande, the greatest river (by name as well as by fact) of them all in this place. But it is one of three that play a major role in Pueblo life, with two smaller rios occupying positions of greater immediacy and impact: the Rio Pueblo de Taos, the river that bisects the old village and serves as its primary water source; and the Rio Lucero above us, that feeds the irrigation ditches, and thus the lands of the outlying areas.
All three rivers play much greater, more complex roles that described here, of course. They are essential elements of life here, not merely on a practical level but in cultural and spiritual terms, as well. If water is life, then these three watersheds are the life of this specific place and its inhabitants, people, animals, plants alike. It should come as no surprise that the waters find themselves reflected in Wings’s work; they’ve been a part of his very identity since time immemorial.
Next week, we’ll be looking through this particular lens at sacred spaces of other sorts. But for this week’s series just ending, I can think of little better to represent the flowing silver waters that sustain this land than these flowing silver works wrought by Wings’s hands.
~ Aji
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