We have spent this month using this series to explore elemental themes in Native art: Water; light (air); earth; and now, we turn to fire.
Our peoples have always known the value of fire, of course — and have always known its power, as well. It cleanses and cauterizes, sanitizing the body and purifying the spirit. It’s why fire is often the center of ceremony, why we use it, by way of its smoke, for Medicine and for sending our prayers to Spirit. It stimulates growth, and transforms the raw materials of sustenance into art for the palate. And it appears in our art, as well: in very practical terms, used as part of the process for clay artisans and some carvers; an in deeply symbolic ways for artists like Wings, who evoke its spirit and power, and the need to respect both, in works as diverse as jewelry and photography and graphic arts.
I wrote that in service of the subject of yesterday’s photo meditation, an image from Wings’s one-man show of two years ago:
The subject of the work is an old horno, or traditional oven, shuttered against the winter weather until pressed into service once again. The hornos are made of the same adobe as the homes in the old village, local clay mixed with straw. It is some of the world’s best insulation, and for purposes of cooking and baking, the adobe material and domed design concentrate the heat in a spectacularly effective way. Such ovens are still used regularly, their interiors fired once again when it’s time to bake bread, cookies, or other traditional foods for feast days and ceremonial purposes, but there are families who still use them throughout the year as a matter of course.
Hornos provide a good example of the way in which fire remains a part of day-to-day traditional life here. They are far from the only example, of course:
Every traditional home in the old village is built around a kiva fireplace (or, in some instances now, a woodstove), which is used as primary heating (although in the bitterly cold winters we get here, supplementation with propane heaters is often a must). One of the hallmarks of winter, one I have long associated with the holidays, is the spicy scent of piñon smoke on the dawn air. When our gallery was located at the Pueblo, it was not uncommon for us to use the fireplace as late as June and as early as September (and occasionally, a fire would be needed in July or August when the monsoons were especially powerful and cold).
It should come as no surprise, then, that representations of fire appear regularly in Native art. It is, after all, an elemental force in more ways than one. Sometimes, its imagery is straightforward: literal depictions of the flames, as with this acrylic painting by Frank Rain Leaf:
Works like this demonstrate the centrality of fire to our ways, our daily lives. I suspect that most people who see this painting assume that it depicts a bygone era, one from hundreds of years ago. Instead, it shows a moment in daily life at Taos Pueblo from a hundred years ago, a thousand . . . and from yesterday, today, and tomorrow. There is not a single element in it that does not fit seamlessly with current existence. The only thing one is less likely to find today is the flute player wearing two long braids, which is how the Pueblo’s men once regularly wore their hair; today, they are more likely to wear it tied back in a bun. However, it is still possible to find men who prefer to wear it in the old way. The traditional dress and the cedar flute and the wooden arbor are all as contemporary as they are ancient.
And, of course, so is the fire, which serves as the center of traditional homes, ceremonial spaces, and the most ordinary of daily activities.
When it comes to indigenous arts, however, perhaps the most obvious way in which fire is used is in the work of Taos Pueblo’s famed clay artisans.
The micaceous clay for which Taos Pueblo’s potters and clay artisans are known worldwide possesses an inherent fire all its own. Its deep red hue evokes the color of the flames even when still damp, but the process of firing (there’s that word again) takes it to whole new levels. Levels, plural: Depending on how hot the fire is, what’s used to cover a given piece during the firing process, and how long it’s left in the kiln, it changes the color, the texture, the “polish,” and the strength of the mica’s shine in the surface.
For a view of what the firing process looks like, we need only travel a tenth of the mile down the road to the home of Wings’s late brother, where his niece now lives:
Photo copyright Camille Bernal, 2016; all rights reserved.
We introduced you to Camille here a year and a half ago; she is an accomplished potter. At that time, she provided us with the above photo, showing her own process of “playing with fire.” Unlike most of her Taos Pueblo peers, she does not typically focus her work around the Pueblo’s indigenous mica clay, although she does use it occasionally as an accent.
Camille’s artistic range is exceptionally wide and deep, and she regularly experiments with diverse materials and techniques. She confesses to having a preferred clay that is known regionally as “Tewa clay,” a silky-smooth deep red earth free of mica and other mineral inclusions. You can see the unpainted clay on the inside of her large Mountain Lion bowl, below:
It, too, is a fiery earth, warm in color and texture and appearance. Its lack of micaceous shine is not any sort of aesthetic deficit; it simply possesses a different kind of beauty.
Among Camille’s works that we have in our inventory, there is one small piece that, for me, especially evokes the imagery of fire — not for its materials, but by virtue of its shape:
I’ve written about this miniature olla before, and about the symbolism it summons to mind. Its uniquely-shaped square neck, very different from the traditional water jars of this area, nonetheless resemble something else found in this part of the world: a type of portable fireplace now commonly known as a chimenea. The design of such fireplaces echoes the shape and structure of the traditional “kiva” fireplaces that were first created by Wings’s own ancestors, the people who, more than a millennium ago, built the homes that constitute the old village. Their construction was a feat of engineering genius: Formed using the same adobe of which the homes themselves are made, they possess natural insulating qualities; their physical structure is designed to push the heat out into the room in such a way that little escapes up the flue. Chimeneas took this essential design and transferred it to out-of-doors environments, permitting effective heating of patios, decks, and other outdoor spaces.
However, when it comes to more traditional Taos Pueblo pottery and figurative pieces, the iconic form is invariably wrought in micaceous clay. As I’ve noted here many times, it’s an indigenous clay, with one specific pit on tribal land set aside for the exclusive use of the enrolled members of Taos and Picuris Pueblos. It’s possible to find it elsewhere, of course, and non-Native potters have long tried to co-opt the genre, but their clay is sourced from other regions where mica-laden red earth is found. There’s something special about works by local indigenous artisans that are fired using the fiery red earth of their own sacred lands.
As I said above, the cover used in the firing process, coupled with variations of temperature and length of firing, create substantial differences in the finished works. Here, the mica clay is popularly used both for pottery and for traditional storytellers (and other figurative works), and those who specialize in the latter form often take a minimalist approach to the firing process. Aaron Mirabal’s storytellers are good examples of this:
Aaron, who is Wings’s cousin, specializes in these miniatures. He fires them just enough to set the clay permanently — hard, dry, and solid — but without any need for particular gloss or shine. They are intended to look perhaps a bit more realistic in terms of texture and finish, since they are personifying grandmothers and children. In addition, he hand-paints the details onto his works, including facial features, hair buns, and clothing, which would mask most of the mica’s glitter anyway.
On the other hand, Wings’s aunt, Juanita Suazo DuBray, creates figurative pieces that speak largely through the clay itself, and so she fires them in such a way as to enhance the mica’s glow:
Juanita is self-taught, but she is a master, and her knowledge of the earth of this place is so intimate as to border on the sacred. Her specialty is her iconic “corn pot” design, but she transfers the same motif to some of her figurative pieces, as well, such as the wedding pair depicted above. This was an absolutely stunning work, one that seemed a simple earthy orange in the shade, but once brought into the sunlight, it seemed to glow from within — and, in truth, it did in a sense, since the clay from which it was wrought was shot through, whole and entire, with naturally-occurring flecks of mica.
In terms of her more traditional corn pots, she varies the finish fairly substantially. Below is one of hers that she fired long enough, and at a high enough heat, to give it a rich polish and intense shine:
As you can see, the color of the clay itself is a substantially darker, richer red, and the heat was sufficient to turn the mica within it to something rather like mirrored glass. She has been known for creating pieces that have far less shine but the same red hue; pieces that are both coarser-textured and a gentle peach color; and works that are positively golden in color, with an exceptionally high polish and fiery surface glow.
Then there are the works by another of Wings’s cousins, Henrietta Gomez. Henrietta also creates extraordinarily fine works, with thin, spectacularly even surfaces, like this wedding vase that now resides with a friend of ours on the West Coast:
Henrietta’s other specialty is the silken high-gloss finish that she gives her works. She fires them in such a way as to ensure that the texture is, indeed, smooth as silk, and they glow with a fire that is wholly a part of the clay itself. In her hands, the firing process turns the clay into a single organic being, one that possesses its own uniform spirit, and one that glows as a larger whole, yet shimmers with thousands upon thousands of tiny individual bursts of light.
Then, of course, there is what is known as “blackware”:
A lot of people think blackware is made from dark brown-black clay, perhaps with a colorant added. It’s not; it’s ordinary “redware,” made from equally ordinary red clay that is fired to create the blackened effect. As I noted above, color and finish depends on the heat of the kiln and the length of time a piece is fired under high heat. Other factors include the substance used to cover the piece while it is being fired, and how closely it is placed over the piece. Today, it’s common to use cow dung as a cover (in the past, horse dung or buffalo dung), because it provides a good solid cover without much added weight, if arranged evenly enough. The tighter the cover, the higher the heat, and the longer a piece is fired, the darker its finish becomes, until eventually, red turns to black.
The enormous pot shown immediately above is a stellar example of Taos Pueblo micaceous blackware. It was made by master potter Angie Yazzie, and, as is customary for her, it features a lip that is nearly paper-thin. Angie’s work is simultaneously extremely bold and amazingly delicate, and pot walls and lips that are exceptionally thin and even are one of her hallmarks. To produce such work requires incredible talent and skill, but it also requires a deep knowledge of the clay itself and of how best to interact with it. Angie once told me that, rather than the more usual covers, she prefers certain types of tree bark: It’s extremely light in weight, rather fibrous, yet provides a good close cover, and permits her to produce blackware with minimal risk of breakage during the firing process.
Fire is used in very practical, literal ways in another form of indigenous art, one that might surprised you at first: the making of Native jewelry. Of course, if you think about it for a moment, it’s obvious; after all, it’s called silversmithing for a reason. Smiths of all sorts have always worked with fire, from iron- and blacksmiths in industrial-sized forges to metalsmith jewelers like Wings who harness its power within the confines of small indoor studio spaces. All of Nature’s elements are needed for silversmiths to produce the sort of work that Wings creates, but there is a special place in the process for fire.
We’ve looked at these processes before, in our series nearly a year and a half ago on Native silversmithing. In that post, which I subtitled Playing With Fire, we covered the basics in an introductory fashion, beginning with the distinction between smelting and melting, the former of which occurs long before the metal ever reaches the smith, while the latter is something a smith may do routinely, especially one who works in ingot and cast media. We spent most of it, however, looking at the day-to-day uses of fire in smithing, which tend to occur on four primary areas: ingot and cast work; forging and shaping; soldering; and annealing. All use heat, and all may use fire outright, flames and all. We’ll look at them again briefly here.
You’ll often hear people use the word “smelting” to refer to the process by which a smith heats a small amount of metal in order to convert it liquid form to alter its shape (usually via cast mold), but what they really mean is plain old melting. That’s all it is: taking a substance in solid form (i.e., ingot) and heating it to such a high degree that it transforms it from a solid to a liquid.
Native silversmiths who specialize in cast work do a lot of this. Wings’s focus tends to be on the greater artistic flexibility that other methods allow him, but he does still do cast work occasionally. Cast work is a metalsmithing technique that has likewise been used for millennia, among cultures the world over.
At bottom, all cast work is is the process by the metal is melted down to liquid form and poured into a mold to cool and harden into a specific shape. Throughout history, different cultures have specialized in different types of molds, using a variety of substances; today, Native American silversmiths largely tend to focus on two or three types [lost-wax or “investment”; sand; and cuttlefish or cuttlebone].
You can read about each of the three in detail here.
Then there’s forging and shaping.
Generally speaking, “forging” refers to large-scale metalworking processes. The term applies, however, to any process of shaping metal through the application of force, whether on a fully-mechanized industrial scale or for a single tiny piece of jewelry shaped using a hammer and anvil. In ancient times, obviously, the latter was the only option, but early smiths soon realized that heating metal generally makes forging it easier. Of course, the very act of striking metal with a hammer on an anvil has its own (limited) warming effect, particularly if it is done with both frequency and intensity.
Some modern Native silversmiths do use the latest in high-tech power tools and other equipment, but most largely work their craft the old-fashioned way, their primary concessions to modernity involving the use of soldering torches and grinding wheels. When it comes to shaping, most of it’s done the old way, with force — and, occasionally, with the assistance of heat. Much of the standard sheet silver and silver “wire,” even heavier-gauge pieces, are susceptible to forging and shaping by way of a vise, a mandril, an anvil, and an assortment of hammers. If it’s heavy enough and large enough, however, the metal may be warmed first to make it more pliable and thus easier to shape.
The image immediately above depicts an example of anticlastic forging, which we’ve covered at length here on several occasions, including in this very series. Most of Wings’s shape work doesn’t require the application of actual flame in order to manipulate the metal, but there are exceptions.
The form of “playing with fire” that Wings’s work most often assumes, however, is simple soldering, and it’s a process that does use an actual flame:
“Solder,” of course, is both noun and verb: It is the type of metal used as a filler to join two other pieces of metal, and the process by which such joining is accomplished. For contemporary Native silversmiths, it’s an essential element of their repertoire, used to attach overlays and underlays, to affix bezels, and to conjoin separate pieces, whether large or small.
Soldering is a process that has reportedly been in use for at least 5,000 to 6,000 years. Today, it’s still used in jewelry, other metallurgical arts, and even the making of stained glass, but its use has also been expanded to a wide array of commercial and industrial items, from plumbing fittings to roof flashing to automotive parts to high-tech electronics. One of its chief advantages is that it is a “permanent” solution to the problem of needing to attach pieces of metal together — but should those pieces ever need to be detached, that can likewise be accomplished with relative ease.
Solder as a metal filler varies fairly widely by purpose. The point is that the filler should have a lower melt point than the metal(s) it is conjoining. Silversmiths use a soldering torch like the one shown in the photo at the top of this post; it emits a gas flame that is held to a hair-thin strand of filler metal as it is placed against the gap between the two pieces to be fused. The direct application of the flame melts the solder, allowing it to flow into the gap. Once stably in place, the smith picks up the whole piece with tongs or tweezers and plunges it into a cold-water “bath” to set the solder. Fluxes made of various materials may also be used to make the solder “take” more readily; these substances “clean” the surfaces of impurities and help prevent oxidation and firescale on the surface of the piece.
Soldering is how works that incorporate overlay techniques are built: Each layer is soldered atop the one below, affixing it permanently. Wings uses overlay as a regular part of his repertoire, but he uses the soldering process more frequently yet; it’s the means by which bezels are attached to the works themselves, so that stones are held securely in place. The cuff bracelet shown immediately above is an example of this, with a pair of bezel-set stones whose settings are soldered directly onto the band. It’s also an example of ingot work and annealing, which we’ll get to in a moment, with a large round bead of melted ingot soldered onto the very center of the band.
Speaking of annealing, it’s something that sounds complicated, but actually has a very simple definition:
Annealing is a process that is by definition present in forging and shaping where heat is involved, and in soldering. Essentially, it’s nothing more than “heat-treating,” for the purpose of improving its workability. As noted above, shaping metal tends to be much easier when the metal is heated; annealing involves heating it to the proper degree to alter the metal’s physical and chemical composition (and then often cooling it to a particular level, as well).
Whenever Wings solders a piece and then plunges it into a cold-water bath to cool it, he’s using annealing to change the silver’s structure rapidly. It permits greater creative flexibility and significantly improves the speed of the entire creative process. The photo immediately above shows a piece in which annealing was used to cement the hand overlay after it was soldered to the piece of hammered ingot that forms the basis of the pendant.
Of course, fire appears in Wings’s work — almost routinely so — in far more metaphorical ways, as well. Sometimes it’s the metal used; sometimes it’s the stone; sometimes its the symbolism of a particular piece.
A few years ago, he acquired some copper, although precisely when and how escapes me; if memory serves, he bought it from someone else in need of some ready cash. He used some of it to make a number of cuff bracelets, including a couple for me to help with the arthritis in my wrists and hands. He also melted some small amounts down to create small coils and serpents that would eventually be overlaid onto other works wrought primarily in sterling silver. An example appears in the serpent overlaid on the reverse of the dragonfly pendant shown above.
The cuffs, however, resembled fire themselves, and their names reflected that. I featured them in a post here nearly two years ago, interspersed with some photos that I had taken of one of our monsoonal sunset skies in an attempt to capture the way these works linked earth and sky.
The first bracelet, entitled Molten Sky, was a smooth anticlastic cuff:
Its gently sloping sides caught and held the light, turning everything reflected in its surface into dancing flames. The color was soft and glowing, a cross between peach and coral underlit by a essential red that made it look more like rose gold than copper.
The second bracelet was called, aptly enough, Copper Lake, for its hammered surface that reflected and refracted the light like waves on the water at sunset. Its color was nearly as fiery as the sky in the photo just above, and at least as shimmery.
Of course, eventually the dusk moves in and turns the clouds violet and the sun’s light scarlet:
It’s a color combination that finds reflection in the fire of more recent works, including one collection in miniature from his one-man show:
The ring above and cuff below are complementary, if not precisely a matched set. The name of each was Fire and Ice, each coordinating, but also able to stand on its own.
The name comes, in part, from the large oval stones central to each piece: snowflake obsidian. Obsidian is, effectively, natural glass, melted by the earth’s own heat and pressure over time on a geologic scale, an inner fire turning sand to something beautifully translucent. The “snowflake” label comes from the white patchy matrix on its surface, a granular product of that epic (and epochal) heating and cooling process.
The bracelet had one other feature that bespoke fire: a pair of garnet cabochons at either end of the row of obsidian stones. These are a deep and glossy scarlet color, fire at its reddest. Their presence made the triangle-wire cuff shown below a natural fit for this collection in miniature:
And the garnet in this cuff gave the piece its name, as well: FireStorm. The stampwork featured thunderhead symbols flanking the wine-colored garnet cabochon at the top, and summoned images of monsoonal sunsets much like the one shown a few photos above.
Of course, in this place, we get garnet-colored skies at sunrise, as well, particularly in the autumn and winter months. It’s a phenomenon that inspired the name of these earrings:
Entitled Dawn of a Red Sun, they embodied the morning fire of the eastern sky.
Speaking of sunrise, sometimes the fire is more orange than red, but no less brilliant:
So it was with this pendant, entitled Greets the Sun, a reference to our traditional practice of greeting the day with prayers sent heavenward by way of feathers and smoke. In this instance, the eagle feather of the pendant was anchored by the most fiery, most intensely brilliant amber cabochon I’ve ever seen, a fitting stand-in for Father Sun’s flaming orb-like self.
There are other stones, too, that are symbolic of the flames. In a post in our Jewels and Gems series subtitled Rings of Fire, we explored red agate, including what’s known as fire agate:
Red agate comes in a variety of actual shades, ranging from brick red so dark its nearly brown to pinks so pale they look to the naked eye like ivory. Often, you’ll find a broad spectrum of shades in a single specimen, like those shown above.
In the last year or so, Wings created a few pairs of earrings using matched pairs of red agate cabochons.
The pair shown immediately was called Morning Fire, dark brick-red heart cabochons accented with Florentine ingot silver medallions stamped with spirals, and with tiny bright copper beads emerging from the flutes above the stones.
Another pair used more translucent red agate cabochons, glassy and glossy in shades of blood red and cabernet:
This pair was entitled Heart of the Dawn, and featured tiny bright amethyst accents. The color combination resembled a sunrise over the peaks in the aftermath of a nighttime snowstorm, violet giving way to crimson as the sun’s rays break through the wall of clouds.
Then there is so-called fire agate, which is a red agate that tends toward the opalescent. The stone in the dragonfly pin below was labeled fire agate, although it tends toward the cloudier, more muted end of the spectrum, an antique rose color:
It’s barely visible in the image, but if you look closely along the left-hand side of the bezel, you can see the banding of the agate. It sold within moments of bringing it into the gallery some eight years ago.
There is, of course, one obvious “stone” used in the Native jewelry of this region that invokes the colors of fire, even though it is very much a creature of the waters: Coral.
Sometimes it’s used merely as an accent, as with these earrings. Their name is Fire and Rain, taken not from the James Taylor song, but from the combination of flaming red cabochons holding, suspended, two heavy drops of bright blue water hardened into the Skystone.
Sometimes, the coral is the focal point of the work, as with this cuff:
In point of fact, this central cabochon in this piece summoned the spirits of the flames in more ways than just one. Besides its fiery spectrum of shades, ranging from peach to orange to crimson to scarlet, shot through with bands and whorls of gold and bronze and metallic brown (a color combination that gave the piece its name, Red Earth), it was created using fire: It’s made of apple coral, a “stone” designed to conserve and increasingly endangered resource. It’s impossible to get “new” coral cabochons anymore, since diving for it is prohibited; the reefs are too badly endangered worldwide now. However, there is still a finite amount of existing natural coral on the market. When Native jewelers cut and cab it, it’s too valuable to allow the detritus to go to waste. And so, the sherds and slivers and dust are all gathered up carefully, pooled together, and treated at a high heat to meld all the pieces into one solid chunk that can, once again, be cut and cabbed. It’s natural coral; it’s simply tiny fragments bonded together through the auspices of extreme temperatures. And it’s this fragmentary internal nature that gives it its uniquely beautiful range of color and mysteriously swirling appearance.
Of course, there is one “stone” above all others that summons the spirit of fire, both in its appearance and its very birth: Rosarita. And its one that Wings used last year to midwife a collection of works that summoned another spirit of the flames: The Firebird Collection. The series actually comprised five separate works, combining both rosarita and coral, but all invoked the symbolism of fire.
The earrings were called, simply enough, RedFeather, a reference to the bright coral cabochons on the wings of each hummingbird. They were snapped up instantly by a dear friend who gave them as a gift to another of her friends for whom hummingbirds have special meaning.
The series also included a cuff bracelet, simple in the extreme:
It was a slender cuff with a very simple band scored into four separate ridged lines, centered by a single oval cabochon in a hand-made bezel. In the bezel, he set one of the most perfect coral cabochons I’ve ever seen, pure scarlet, with a nearly mirror-like gloss. It was called The Inner Fire, and another dear friend snapped it up equally instantly, to coordinate with a beautiful multistrand necklace she already owned, one made of deep scarlet beads of natural branch coral and heishi.
The other three pieces in the collection were the primary works in the series, and all were built around the focal point of a spectacular rosarita cabochon.
Rosarita, of course, is technically not a “stone” at all; it’s gold slag that comes from a particular South American mine of the same name, one that specializes in a refining process that produces slag in this intensely crimson color. It’s a material both hard enough and flexible enough to permit cutting, cabbing, and polishing, and it’s susceptible to a spectacularly high gloss.
The third in the series was named for one of the raptors who shares space with us here: RedTail. The name derived from the fan-like flare of the triangular cabochon that formed the pendant, much like the fiery fan that gives that hawk its name:
He combined the simple scarlet pendant with a combination of rondel beads in sponge coral, onyx, Picasso marble, and graduated sizes of dark brown olivella-shell heishi. This particular pendant resides in the personal collection of a third dear friend.
The next piece in the series was named for another bird that makes its home here part of the year, this time, the male:
Its name is RedWing, from the teardrop-shaped pendant that looks for all the world like the red teardrop bars on the the wings of a male red-winged blackbird. Wings set this one in a more complex bezel, one accented with graduated beads hand-made from sterling silver ingot, then suspended it from a necklace of old branch coral barrel beads interspersed with lengths of jet heishi-style beads, ending in gray olivella-shell heishi. This one remains available for purchase in our Necklaces Gallery here on the site.
Finally, we come to the collection’s eponymous work: Firebird.
This piece comprised an exceptionally large rosarita cabochon, brilliantly crimson, accented at the bottom with three bright round cabochons of natural coral linked with hand-made ingot spacer beads. Wings created a spectacular bail for it, then suspended the whole pendant from a necklace composed of graduated lengths of apple coral rondels alternating with graduated heishi-style jet beads. Together, it produced a work of breathtaking beauty, one worthy of the name of the wingéd spirit who rises from the flames to fly stronger for their tempering. It is available for purchase in the same gallery.
The Firebird flies, of course, upon the light — upon the fire of the Father Sun’s own rays. That fire provides inspiration for Wings’s other medium, photography, on a regular basis. Because I included a great deal of such imagery in the post in this series two short weeks ago, I will only reprise one here: an image from New Year’s Day three years ago, with the sky in flames and the snow its own cold fire.
In this instance, sky, light, and world alike were all aflame, allowing us not only to see through the fire, but to touch its light without fear of getting burned.
It reminds me of the role fire plays in our ceremonial traditions, in which its power is transmuted into Medicine, harnessed carefully, honored and treated with the utmost respect. And so we come full circle:
The fire as center of the home, of daily life — with cedar and sage bundles close to hand, ready o send our prayers aloft, through the fire, on feathers and smoke.
~ 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.
