In this threshold month, this series has taken a decidedly elemental turn. It’s not surprising, I suppose: In this place where water is life and the light (and thus the air) is its own defining spirit, it’s impossible to ignore the building blocks of Mother Earth herself.
Today, we return to the most foundational of those blocks, bringing our focus, quite literally, back down to earth.
For our cultures, earth writ Earth is an integral a part of daily life, a physical, tangible element, a spiritual focus, a subject and object of art. But in its more fundamental form, earth with a lower-case “e,” it fulfills all of those functions and more.
Especially in this place.
In this place, the people’s world arises from the very earth itself. The thousand-year-old village seems to arise organically from the dusty red-gold floor of the plaza, as though the very grains of sand themselves have come together on their won, coalescing into a community, whole and entire, that has sheltered the people for a millennium and more and today stands, living, as the oldest city on this land mass we call Turtle Island.
I’ve written before about the role of the earth in this place, about a relative saying to me, of outsiders, “They don’t know this dirt. It means nothing to them,” as she made a sifting motion in the air in front of her with her fingers, invisible grains of sanding cascading through them. Eternal winds have blown the dirt of the plaza in tiny whirlwinds, spiraling around the moccasined feet of a thousand years of dancers, their steps gentle upon the soil yet powerful in their imprint upon this world’s spirit.
It seems that it should be a given that the earth of this place is a significant presence, an elemental spirit, of its art, but that doesn’t seem to be the case, at least with regard to the perceptions of the outside world. Wings and I have both found ourselves explaining repeatedly, in the most rudimentary of terms, the outsized role that the region’s rich and sandy soil plays in every aspect of existence here.
And so, since we have already addressed water and air (by way of the light), today, we get down to earth.
The photo at the top of this place, taken in early December of 2008, provides a good illustration of the centrality of the earth to life in this place. Wings captured that image early one morning as we headed into the gallery to open up for the day. The dog resting against the pile of rocks is our own Raven, who at that time was an abandoned puppy, starving and skittish, who had nonetheless found his way to us. He visited daily, seeking a warm spot by the fire and perhaps a few bites of our lunches (which we were giving him independently of one another, neither of us admitting it to the other at first). By December, he was there waiting in front of the door every single morning when we arrived, but it would take two more months, a literal deadline, a pitched battle, and a very cold winter ride in the back of the truck for him and me for us to get him home. As I write this, he’s lying asleep at my feet, safe indoors from the winds howling outside.
But back to the photo: I have always loved this particular shot, not merely because it includes Raven, but because of its composition, the naturally-occurring arrangement of elements natural, architectural, and cultural. If one wants to see the role the earth plays in this place, this provides a good snapshot.
The first thing one notices is the building in the foreground, of course: It was a wing off the home that we used as a gallery, a solitary room in which we stored firewood. The edge of the wall in the left foreground extended from the edge of the gallery itself. At the time this shot was taken, all of their surfaces had been freshly mudded about three months previously, giving them a warmly welcoming appearance. Across the path, the corner of the wall around the old mission church’s courtyard is just visible, and in the background, South House rising beyond the river in front of earth of another sort — the mountains that are sacred to the people. And there is Raven’s nest: a pile of large stones worn smooth by time and the elements, rocks that Wings himself had piled around the base of the post, a weathered bit of a local tree left largely in its natural state. As we will see below, stones are another way of viewing earth as art.
And all of it, all of it, is connected by the dry and dusty earth of the plaza, the same warm reddish color as the walls of the old village homes. The same warm reddish color, as a matter of fact, as the micaceous pottery for which Taos Pueblo’s potters are internationally renowned.
To begin the substance of today’s post, I want to go back in time for a moment. We need to visit the ancestors, some of them contemporaries of those who built the old village in the first place.
Here in New Mexico, we are fortunate to have a tangible historical record going back millennia. In additions to the ruins of long-abandoned villages, we have several sites cross the state where indigenous rock art remains well preserved, much of it still mostly untouched. Our world here is full of natural rock art, of course: the beauty of the peaks and valleys, the rivers and other watersheds in our own area; the red rock canyon country west of here; the hoodoos of Bisti in Dinetah; the shell mounds to the south. But we are also fortunate to have large outcroppings of ancient basaltic rock, ancient deposits of sandstone and slate and other rock that is susceptible to carving and etching, and the ancient ones made good use of those resources.
Wings has, on several occasions over the years, visited petroglyph sites that are relatively close to hand and photographed the images left there by the ancestors. Their messages may not be entirely clear and discernible down the long path of time that they must travel to us now, but they stir something deep in the spirit nonetheless, a rcongition of something, even if we cannot tell precisely of what.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps the touching of the spirits of two generations so long distant through the medium of art etched meticulously into a solid surface is message enough.
Still, it’s tempting to search for patterns, and to find them, particularly when the imagery bespeaks of orbs and directions and the number of weeks in the year, of those eternal truths that existed for them as surely as they do for us.
In the case of petroglyphs and pictographs, it is an example of the earth as canvas: earth defined as cosmos as model, yes, but very literal earth as medium.
In modern indigenous art, the earth serves as both medium and model across numerous artistic genres.
In Wings’s own work, perhaps the most obvious example is in his photography. There are, of course, all of the innumerable landscape photos he’s taken over the years:
This one, of the cliff faces at El Salto, has long been one of my favorites. In my own mind, it captures the earth in the visage of a spirit I think of as The Old Man. In our way, of course, the phrase “old man” is not a pejorative, but a simple descriptor of age and the wisdom accumulated with and the respect accrued to it as a result. Also of course, this is not one single outcropping, but several separate cliff faces. Nevertheless, from the vantage of point of our land, it looks very much like an ancient face gazing upward at the sky, overlooking the lives of us mere mortals here at the feet of the mountain from which it emerges. It is earth in the sense of mountain, rock, and soil all combined, and Earth, too, as one face of our broader world.
Still, earth perhaps appears most recognizeably in Wings’s photography in another form: in the architecture of the Pueblo itself. It is, as noted above, the very stuff of which the village is made, its walls formed from the local clay via the expert hands of the Pueblo’s own master masons:
Because the village homes are so very, very old, they rest upon the earth itself — there are no foundations, in the sense that we think of them today, and so the walls appear to arise straight out of the soil of the plaza itself, organic, living things. They are both — organic, that is, and living as well, coming from the same earth and people, and sheltering both as they continue to do.
It makes the local clay a very literal, tangible cornerstone:
Flanged freehand at the proper angles, it provides support for entire walls, and thus for an entire row of interconnected buildings — and ultimately, for an entire community.
And it begins long before the mudded and finished exteriors that outsiders see:
In this place, the bricks are still made by hand, freehand, placed carefully atop and beside each other and meticulously mortared with the same clay. Walls made in this way survive hundreds of years, some of them now exceeding a thousand. They are, it strikes me, a perfect metaphor for the people who built them: strong, stable, solid, built with care and respect for the work, built to last for generations unconceived in either body or mind.
When outsiders think of earth in terms of the Pueblo’s art, however, what probably comes most frequently to mind is its pottery. Taos Pueblo is famous world-wide for its iconic pottery, made of a local micaceous clay. It is the same soil that is used to make the adobe bricks that form the buildings of the old village, but with one specific and notable difference in its mineral content: the mica. It’s as though the universe’s own mirror fell to earth, shattering into billions of tiny sherds that spread throughout the soil, lighting the clay from within.
A spectacularly fine example of such micaceous pottery is the piece below, one of the works we carried by internationally recognized Taos Pueblo potter Angie Yazzie, a true master of the craft.
The stair-stepped pattern of this piece is one that is known conventionally as a “kiva steps” design. With this one (and another, which sold prior to the one pictured here), Angie took that pattern back to a much more ancient motif, a design that paid tribute to the Four Sacred Directions. In this instance, it appears that each direction arises out of the world’s own sphere, holding it in a protective embrace.
The earthy motif appears in pottery in other ways besides the medium of the mica clay, however.
In this work, Wings’s late sister, Cynthia Bernal Pemberton. used the clay to fashion a flask, a canteen-style version large enough to hold water. On its front, summoned into existence in sharp relief, is a turtle, itself a spirit of both earth and water, one that can walk upon the land and swim in the seas. It’s the perfect spirit to unite the micaceous earth of the flask with its watery contents.
Then there are the seed pots.
These are small jars for storage and planting, still in use today. They tend to look like the one shown here, by Benito Romero — little round jars with a single tiny round hole in the top. Seeds are deposited and kept there over the winter, then simply shaken out into rows and mounds of earth when planting season rolls around again.
But the local micaceous clay is used for more than just pottery. Some potters, like Wings’s aunt, Juanita Suazo DuBray, are also known for their figurative works, such as storytellers:
Of all of her storytellers that I’ve seen over the years, this one (long since sold) remains my favorite. It was the only one left unpainted, the beauty of the micaceous clay shining through the entire work. In this instance, it’s a grandmother with three children, but it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase “Earth Mother.”
Then there are the works of Martin Romero, Wings’s cousin.
Martin works in mica clay, in several different styles, but he is perhaps best known for his architectural renderings of Pueblo houses in miniature. He fashions them from the same clay as he does his pottery, and fires them in the same way, but he adds realistic touches, such as tiny hornos (ovens) and hand-made wooden arbors and pine ladders.
There are clay artists who specialize in fetishes, too:
This tiny buffalo is another piece by Benito Romero, fashioned in vintage style, allowing the spirit of the animal to speak through the clay and the outlines of its shape. In this instance, he has turned it into a medicine fetish, adding an offering bundle by attaching beadwork, quills, feathers, and a fabric rosette via a tightly-bound strand of sinew.
Other carvers choose specific local stones to produce their fetishes:
This one was a medicine turtle, summoned straight from a block of yellow sandstone, given a pair of inlay eyes and an offering bundle consisting of beads and shell and feathers.
Others rely on the stone to do most of the speaking for the animal’s spirit, as with this one:
It’s a vintage-style beaver, hewn out of local Pilar slate with an unusually brown cast to it. Again, the stone does the heavy lifting, with the carving providing only the barest of overt allusions to identity by way of pointed snot and rounded body and cross-hatched tail.
The same is true, of course, of sculptors who carve more full-sized works:
A good example comes in the form of Mark Swazo-Hinds’s stylized Corn Maidens. Hewn from orange-white sandstone, they are little more than rounded, lightly shaped blocks of stone, the faces and expressions summoned from within the stone itself by way of the simplest lines and geometric shapes. They seems to rise straight out of the earth, just as the corn whose spirit they embody rises from the soil in similar fashion.
Not all of the “earthworks” by Taos Pueblo artists come from strictly local sources, although they may be said broadly to come from this region. To return for a moment to pottery, some contemporary artisans, Wings’s niece Camille Bernal among them, pay regular tribute to the earth while expanding their reach:
Camille is a potter who specializes in the use of Tewa clay. The label is not to be confused with Tiwa, the name assigned to the ethnic subgroup, language, and spiritual traditions of the people of Taos Pueblo; Tewa is the name assigned to certain other Pueblos not far south and west of here. This particular clay comes from the lands whose indigenous peoples are part of the Tewa subgrouping, hence the clay’s name. It is a beautiful material, warmly red but lacking the micaceous shine of the clay from here. That subdued finish, gives it a look and feel that manages to be both silken and velvety simultaneously, providing both ease of a workability and a wonderful tactile sensation. Camille processes her clay herself, ensuring just the perfect texture for her delicate work.
When I say “delicate work,” I refer to pieces like this:
This tiny miniature olla is made of her beloved Tewa clay, painted in soft earthy plant-based shades, and manifesting a similarly earthy set of motifs. At the four directions are small scarabs, themselves very much spirits of the earth, insects that have been thought by ancient indigenous cultures the world over to hold great power. Beneath and between each creature, small blossoms shoot up from the soil, bringing the “earth” motif full circle.
When it comes to Wings’s non-photographic work, “earth” appears in a variety of forms:
One is in the blades of his traditional knives, hand-knapped from various types of stone. The one shown above is a form of mulberry-red siltstone, like pipestone. He has created others over the years from chert and obsidian, as well.
Speaking of siltstone, however, the most common way in which Wings uses the earth as a medium is in the materials from which his silverwork pieces are made. The silver itself, of course, is a part of the earth, although precious metals take much more processing to make them workable, at least in comparison to the stones that he uses. Below, we have an example of such a stone, turquoise, in various stages of “processing”: rough, nugget, free-form, and carefully cut and polished cabochon form.
The three large chunks at bottom and right in the photo are Bisbee turquoise in its rough form. I mentioned siltstone again a moment ago? That’s that deep purple-red material through which the veins of turquoise flow. It is “earth” in the most honest sense: Eons’ worth of layers upon layers of sediment, mixed with water and heat and pressure and time, hardened into a rich red earthy materials that provides some of the most beautiful host rock for turquoise in the world.
At the center of the same photo is a polished teardrop-shaped cabochon that is more beige than blue. It’s what’s known as ribbon turquoise (or sometimes boulder turquoise), and it’s commonly mined in places where the turquoise deposits exist only in the thinnest of veins (i.e., “ribbons”). The beige and brown surrounding the lien of blue is ordinary host rock, simple earth itself, but it makes for a remarkable, and remarkably beautiful, contrast to the intensity and brilliance of the turquoise.
Speaking of host rock and simple earth, Wings has created several works over the years utilizing stones less commonly found in Native jewelry:
This cuff, featuring a spectacularly large free-form cabochon of rhodonite, was called Sand Painting. The source of the name should be obvious; what is less obvious is the unusual nature of the stone. Rhodonite most commonly manifests in a peach-to-pink spectrum of color, with a matrix that tends toward charcoal gray. There was precious little of either color in this specimen, other than as lowlights backing the tan portion; the rest of the stone was a lacy swirl of rich sepia tones.
In that regard, it looked very much like another stone that is, truly, a bit of earth itself: picture jasper.
It’s a stone we’ve covered here before. The specimen shown above always makes me think of a planet, perhaps Jupiter, or one of its moons, aswirl in a cosmic storm of red dust.
Wings has used picture jasper on a number of occasions over the years. At the moment, only one such work remains in inventory:
The name of the cuff is Desert Canyons, another name whose genesis should be obvious. It’s classic picture jasper (called “landscape jasper” by some), with its appearance of a desert landscape.
At the time last year that we featured this stone as part of our Jewels and Gems series, I chose the following cabochon as one especially fine example of its look:
It spoke to a dear friend and client, one who saw its promise and possibility. She commissioned a piece from Wings with that particular stone, but left it entirely to him to design. The result was this:
It was a melding of the spirits of earth and water, not merely by way of the pendant, but by means of the beads in the necklace from which it hung — leopard-skin jasper, several sizes and types of olivella-shell heishi, copper. But the pendant was inspired: a landscape of the earth itself, used to create the shell of the very spirit who, in the old stories, holds our world on her back.
Speaking of the world, there is another stone that Wings uses periodically that greatly resembles this big blue marble:
It’s actually a combination gem, a hybrid of sorts: azurite and malachite, which are often found together. In cabochon form, like the tiny one depicted above, it often looks very much like representations of our planet as seen from space, a round orb of blue ocean dotted here and there with green land masses.
One of Wings’s more recent works that incorporated it was this one, another type of “earth”:
The azurite and malachite beads formed the bulk of the necklace, augmented at either end by rondels of green turquoise and copper. But the pendant was formed of a stone called staurolite, a wholly local, wholly indigenous rock that manifests naturally in its spoked cross-like shape (and “cross” is the Greek root of its name, although one might naturally expect it to be “star,” a shape that similarly suits it).
Then, of course, there is turquoise itself. It’s the most commonly used gemstone in Native jewelry, including that made by Wings. It comes in a stunning array of colors and shades, and the blues and greens, mixed with inclusions of host rock, often look for all the world like a topographic map.
Sometimes, the association with earth is both visual and metaphorical, as with this ring:
The title of the piece is Mother Earth, a name that derives from its lush green color shot through with swaths and spiderwebs of charcoal-black chert. This bright green is a shade common to much Nevada turquoise, and when it encompasses the entire stone, as here, it bespeaks fertility and fecundity and an essential femininity associated with both earth and Earth.
Speaking of fecundity, one of Wings’s newest rings provided another example of a stone that looks like Earth herself:
Flowering Earth was the name of this one — a piece that spoke of summer’s lush green and rich brown soil, of the flowering of the plant world into renewed existence after a long bare winter. It now resides on the hand of another dear friend and client, one for whom the imagery holds special meaning.
Perhaps my all-time favorite, however, among what I tend to think of as Wings’s (entirely informal) series of “topographic maps” is this one:
The name of this cuff was Dreams of Earth and Sky, a reference to the melding of the map-like Colorado turquoise stone with the celestial motifs of the stampwork on the band. This was a truly exceptional work, one of those in which symbol and substance come together in a flawless way, and the piece sold to another dear friend, within less than an hour of posting.
But for today’s purposes, perhaps the most fitting example of Wings’s work comes from a modest (and modestly priced) work of a couple of years ago:
Out of the blue, we were contacted by a prospective client from another country. He had recently visited the Pueblo, and had been taken with the turtle motif, but had purchased nothing while he was here. Back home, the imagery continued to haunt him, and he decided to search the Internet for examples of such works . . . and found some of Wings’s turtles, those made for some very special clients who are near and dear to us in multiple ways. This client could not afford anything of that size or value; he had a specific price range, and hoped Wings would have a small stone in similar colors and patterning that could be used as the focal point of a much smaller turtle. As a personal favor, Wings lowered his price substantially, and created the pin you see above: a tiny lapel-sized incarnation of that great strong spirit, ever humble, who carried the world on her back. At the center, he placed a sizeable round cabochon of brilliant green Royston turquoise, with a warm earthy matrix that bore a startling resemblance to some of the edges of Turtle Island.
It was a way to wed the earth, in very literal terms, to the Earth as we know her today, our world, our Mother, carried on the back of our Grandmother.
It was also a very down-to-earth way of using art to honor the generations that form our sacred hoop.
~ 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.
