Yes. It is.
We talk a lot here about the fact that water is life: Nowhere is that more true, after all, than in desert country. We know its value — and its power.
And power, of course, is a theme that runs throughout indigenous art. Sometimes, it’s in the honorific sense, showing respect for it. Sometimes, it’s an overt invocation, seeking to summon, to draw upon, even to manifest that power by way of recreating its image. And sometimes, its merely a recounting of daily life, art as diary, as historical record.
It should come as no surprise, then, that the motifs of the great elemental powers appear in our art. That’s especially true in a place like this, where the waters form some of the literal, tangible centers of life, both physical and spiritual.
On this first day of the month in which spring will arrive officially, and at a time when for all practical purposes, it is already here, the influence of water seemed a good topic for today’s exploration of indigenous arts. [A word of warning: Today’s post will be especially image-heavy, not for any dearth of discussion — there’ll be plenty of that — but because the topic really requires a good deal of illustration, especially when we get to matters of symbology.]
This land is classified, by those with expertise in such matters, as “high desert”: a mostly-arid environment situated above a certain elevation. It fits. But we are fortunate here to have a much more diverse ecosystem than what the word “desert” usually calls to mind: four discrete seasons, a not-insignificant amount of annual precipitation, a number of major watersheds. It’s easy to see why Wings’s people chose this place as their home, and they have been here since the time before time.
It’s also perhaps natural, given the otherwise dry and arid environment and the life-sustaining import of these local watersheds, why they should have assumed a significant role in the people’s cosmology and in their daily lives. We live virtually alongside the Rio Grande, and its tributaries: The Red River sits above us, the Quartzite below.
The Rio Lucero, above us on tribal lands, feeds the very land on which we live; the Rio Pueblo runs directly through the old village, and is still the source of water for drinking and cooking and bathing for those who live within its ancient walls. The region is home to some of the state’s lushest farmlands, a product of ancient irrigation methods of hand-ditching that the Spanish labeled the acequia system. Every spring, the men of the Pueblo who are able to participate gather to clean out the ditches, readying them for irrigation. Here on this land, we irrigate in the same fashion every year, and many have been the times that I have been out turning a shovel to create earthen dams, sometimes donning muck boots at midnight to accompany Wings to the outer fields to reroute the water.
And then, of course, there is the lake. The lake. Blue Lake, the spiritual center of the people’s world.
And water creates its own art, painting landscapes and sculpting the countryside.
It carves a path through the very earth itself, creating the mountain range that the people here hold sacred, turning the land into a work of art that houses the spirits.
It’s not only here, of course. Native peoples all over this land we call Turtle Island have always known the value and power of water. For my own peoples, lakes are central, also; there, they are now known as the Great Lakes, and they are great indeed — and now under great ecological threat. There are smaller lakes and rivers, too, watersheds crucial to our ancestors’ survival, places where the waters created their own art eons ago, like the Pictured Rocks.
Here in this place, water is also used for eminently practical, yet wholly culturally traditional purposes. It’s mixed with the local clay and straw to make the adobe bricks of which the old village homes have been built for a thousand years and more, and used for mudding and surfacing the homes. It’s the same material from which the hornos (ovens), still used for baking, are constructed.
It’s used in treating and tanning hides for use in shelter, clothing, art. It’s combined with soap made from traditional yucca, and used in ceremonial cleansing. It fills the wedding vases used in traditional nuptials.
Water is also important for its role as habitat and home for those spirits whose bodies and very existence inform indigenous art. There is coral, of course — the branch version that becomes the blood-red “gemstone” so integral to Native gemwork:
Jewelers and smiths like Wings turn such natural beauty into works of wearable art:
Then there are the shells. Mother-of-pearl is a bright shining “gemstone” used frequently in Southwestern Native jewelry, particularly that by Diné and Zuni artisans. Abalone is not uncommon, either. In Wings’s own collection of materials, he also has paua shell and puka shell, both found in other indigenous cultures.
And then there is heishi. We’ve looked at heishi here on several occasions; it’s a very traditional Pueblo form of beadwork used in jewelry, in which small rondels are carved and drilled from olivella shell, and strung together in what are often long heavy ropes of beads. Today, what bears the heishi label comes in a variety of colors, ranging from the very traditional browns and grays and off-whites of olivella shells to the deeper purples and mulberries and bright whites of mussel shells to the delicate peach and apricot shades of melon shells. It’s possible to find forms dyed in a virtual rainbow of shades, too, although they possess nowhere near the value of natural shell beads and cannot properly be called heishi, but at most, heishi–style.
Some of the spirits linked with water are popular subjects for Native art, from the katsinam associated with the rains to the animal spirits that live within them to those whose connections exist on other spiritual planes.
The katsinam often have direct connections to the skies, to the clouds and the rains. One such is the Longhair, whose luxuriant locks and beard represent the monsoonal rains of summer, which for much of this broader region provide the majority of annual precipitation. This incarnation of the Longhair wears robes adorned with the images of the rains themselves.
There are the animal spirits, too, those who make their home within the waters.
There are the fish:
Trout is still a staple here, setting tables in summer. It’s not uncommon for the men to go up into the mountains to fish the local lakes and rivers, which are still half-decently populated with the trout indigenous to this area, although they are at increasing risk.
Turtles can still be found here, too. They are creatures of intertribal significance, as seen in our collective tendencies to refer to this land mass as Turtle Island, a name derived not from its shape, but from the story found in various nations of the Algonquin subgroups (and some others), in which Grandmother Turtle saved the First People upon their emergence from the depths, because she was the only creature with a strong hard shell upon which they could live.
Then, of course, there is Dragonfly. Dragonfly (like his smaller counterpart, Damselfly) has long been a source of inspiration for Wings. They make their home with us in the warmer season, living and raising the young at the pond:
Symbolically, they make their home year-round in his art. There is the photography, of course, like the image shown immediately above. But Wings has long created works built around Dragonfly’s image and meaning, symbolizing everything from romantic love to the darting creature’s status as a messenger of the spirits to its associations with water and fertility.
This one, found in the Necklaces Gallery, synthesizes all of this small but powerful spirit’s meanings, to some extent.
Then there are the spirits that inhabit the waters of a different world, one that exists on a plane mostly beyond our reach . . . like the Water Bird:
It’s sometimes known as the Peyote Bird, an element sacred to the practices of the Native American Church. But the Water Bird has existed in the cosmologies of many of our peoples for millennia, long before there was such a thing as “Native,” “American,” or “Church.” It is an ancient being, and a powerful one, and as its name indicates, it is linked to that element that is the very stuff of life.
When it comes to Native art, water also plays a very large role in the mechanics of creation. Perhaps the most immediately obvious is pottery: Water must be mixed with the clay to permit the artist to mold it into the desired shape, whether the end result is a classic pot or a figurative work like a storyteller.
Here at Taos Pueblo, most pottery is created in the traditional fashion, of the local micaceous clay, and water is usually the only other element in its creation. Most traditional potters who specialize in the mica clay avoid other forms of adornment, such as painted patterns, preferring instead to let the beauty of the mica and the red earth speak for themselves.
However, contemporary potters are branching out into other styles. One such is Wings’s own niece, Camille Bernal, who does use the mica clay occasionally, but works mostly in a special Tewa clay with a warm red earthy hue. She processes it herself, using . . . what else? water. She also frequently accents her work with delicate plant-based paints, which of course requires water in mixing the colors and diluting them as needed.
The pot shown directly above is an especially fine example of Camille’s work, made of her preferred hand-processed Tewa clay, covered on the exterior with a sheer gray-white paint of unusual delicacy; she then added the checkerboarded flower patterns in thicker paint in a variety of hues.
Not all of our clay artisans focus solely on pottery, however. Some create classic storytellers, iconci Pueblo figurative pieces:
Again, water comes into play both in the formation of the clay and in the painted accents that give more discrete form and shape to the figures.
Naturally, artists whose medium is visual graphics mix water with their paints. Some specialize in watercolor painting per se, producing breathtaking works like this one, by Comanche artist Tim Saupitty.
In it, he has used a watercolor medium to create the image of a dancer who draws her power from another spirit associated with the waters: Dragonfly, who we encountered above. Here, the tiny creatures dart and dance in the air around her and accent her dress.
As noted above, water is used in the treating and tanning of hides. This makes it indispensable to leatherwork arts of all sorts — and to the building of drums. Here at Taos Pueblo, drums are created the old way, whether they are hand drums with small pieced frames or larger upright drums built from a single hollowed-out section of a tree’s trunk. In either case, the coverings that produce the sound are made of beautifully tanned hides, stretched tightly over the top (and sometimes also the bottom) of each drum. Water makes the hides pliable enough for working, so that the when dry, the hide fits properly and endows each drum with a beautifully resonant voice.
Water is also used by carvers and sculptors, particularly those who work in larger sculptural and figurative media. It sluices the dust and detritus from the stone during the carving process, and in some instances, makes the stone more susceptible to cutting and shaping.
In the same vein, Wings uses water to aid in lapidary work. Most of the time, he uses stones that have already been cut and cabbed, but he has the necessary equipment and experience to do it himself, if need be. Sometimes a particular stone is needed for a given project or commission, and he must size or shape it to fit; sometimes it’s simply a matter of “filing off” a corner or an edge to permit something to sit more securely in a bezel. But lapidary equipment uses water not only to keep the machinery cool, but to help lubricate the cutting process itself, which helps prevent fracture and breakage in the stone.
Believe it or not, though, water puts in an appearance in the creative process for every single piece Wings makes. It’s used as a rinse in the smithing process, and also to cool and set pieces once soldered. The number of works he’s created over the years that have not included water in the making are slim at best; more likely, they are nonexistent.
Finally, of course, there is the spiritual and symbolic role that water plays in Native art. In Wings’s work, water forms a critical element.
There is, of course, the gemstone he uses most frequently: Turquoise. Its nickname is the Skystone, a name drawn from the old recounting of how it came to be. Turquoise, so the story goes, is simply a bit of the bright blue sky, fallen in the form of rain and hardened upon impact with the warm earth. It’s the most commonly used gem in Southwestern Native art, and its blues and greens do reflect the color of the sky and the waters alike.
There is one form of turquoise that, quite literally, contains water (beyond the obvious mineralogical content) — or at least, it did at the time the stone assumed its current form:
It’s called water-web turquoise, and what makes it distinctive is its matrix, formed in whole or in part by inclusions not of another mineral, but of water. The high-grade Kingman cabochons shown immediately above are examples of this phenomenon; the paler lines of spiderwebbing, those that appear to be fading into the stone, are the water-webs.
Of course, what all of this means is that virtually any work that includes turquoise can be said to have a connection to water, if that’s what the artist intends. It’s not, however, the only way to summon its elemental spirit.
Wings has long invoked the rivers and lakes, the clouds and the rain, in his work, even in pieces wrought entirely of sterling silver. An example is this ring:
The piece’s name is The Rivers, for the smooth cascade of hand-scored silver, like an infinite flow of water. [This piece is no longer available, having sold late today, as it happens.]
Another example may be found among his recent series of rolled ingot cuff bracelets:
The name of this one is Tributaries, so named for its subtle line pattern, evoking the smaller rivers that feed the Pueblo’s lands, and feed into the much larger flow of the Rio Grande.
Then, of course, there are the lakes:
This piece, of hammered copper, was named Copper Lake. It referred mostly to its appearance, like the effect of a brilliant sunset upon shimmering waters. However, the piece now resides in my own collection, and it carries an additional layer of meaning for me, since the Great Water Snake that inhabits one of my own people’s lakes is said to have a tail made of copper.
Here, though, one lake is of far greater importance than the rest:
This lapis and turquoise cuff, which sold about five years ago, was named for those very waters, their image captured in the stunning depths of its enormous lapis cabochon.
Despite the very real presence of numerous watersheds, however, precipitation plays a far greater symbolic role in the Native art of this place. Rain is precious here, a gift and a blessing, not to be taken for granted or treated with the slightest disrespect. It’s no surprise, then, that it should be honored repeatedly in Wings’s art.
Sometimes, the rain motif appears entirely metaphorically, made concrete in a work’s name:
The name of these earrings was Raindrops. a reference to their elongated shape and the presence of a pair of deep-blue Morenci Skystones.
Around the same time, he created a pair vaguely similar in shape, but with appreciable differences, too:
The name of this pair was Thunderheads, so named for the towering lighter cabochons at the top with the three darker ones layered beneath, like the clouds that carry the rains.
Speaking of thunderheads, during much of the year, they manifest in the skies here almost daily, even when they deliver no rain directly to us. They appear with similar frequency in Wings’s work, by way of a popular symbol that, inverted, becomes an ancient “kiva steps” pattern, like the stepped front on the micaceous corn pot depicted above. It’s a near-perfect symmetry, since both are required to sustain the people.
This symbol is arrayed in a positive/negative pattern chased along the band of the cuff shown immediately above, displaying both meanings. What is not visible in the photo is the detail that gives the piece its name, Sacred Drops: At either end of the band appear a line of four stamped hoops, both a symbol of water and of life’s sacred hoop. In a land where water itself is life, the piece wound up naming itself.
At any rate, this inverted stepped pattern, shaped a bit like a Mayan pyramid held upside-down, is extraordinarily popular in the art of this region. Wings uses it regularly, and it appears on his most recent masterwork, a truly breathtaking version of the traditional concha belt:
You can see the stepped symbolism alternating around the center of the buckle. This work is named, appropriately enough, Offering, a reference to its life-giving symbols and the fact that each of the forty-nine stones used in the piece is held in place in the bezel with a layer of ceremonial tobacco, which we use as an offering.
Sometimes, though, the raincloud imagery needs to be more explicit. Wings has a stamp for that, too:
As you can see, literal rainclouds trace the length of the handle of this miniature collector’s spoon. Its name is The Place of Emergence, a nod to Grandmother Turtle at its end and the journey-like symbolism of the bowl, coupled with the fact that it’s a baby spoon intended to memorialize another sort of emergence: that of a newborn child.
Not all of water;s appearance in indigenous silverwork is so explicit, however. Sometimes, it’s more referential, a cultural bit of insider’s knowledge that gives it specific meaning beyond its surface beauty.
We spoke of the Water Bird earlier. Above are a pair of earrings Wings created in its image about a decade ago. These were exceptionally powerful, assuming, as they did, the Water Bird’s own form and shape, centered by cabochons of deep red coral, another spirit of the waters.
And sometimes, the imagery is even less direct. So it is with Thunderbird:
Thunderbird is not Water Bird; the two are distinct. Thunderbird does not even carry water per se. Rather, she bears the power of the storm: Her voice is thunder, her arrows lightning, and she both calls and carries the storm. She may not be the rain, but she is the bringer of rain.
And to me, for deeply personal reasons, she is one of the most powerful spirits linked to the sacred element that sustains us all.
Water is art.
Water is life.
Art, too, is life.
~ 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.
