All of those beautiful day-long stormclouds yesterday, and we received maybe two dozen scattered and momentary drops of rain.
That’s the way of it in this place, though, especially in recent years. And while we desperately need the rain here, it’s even more important that precipitation fall upon the peaks . . . and they got a little snow yesterday. Not much; certainly not enough to show. But it’s something, and in a land so badly wounded by record drought, we’re grateful for whatever it can get.
Perhaps more than any other time, the weeks that carry us through fall and into winter remind us that it is the land that protects us, sustains, keeps us alive. We are sheltered by earth and light — according to some of the oldest of stories, literally kept alive by the world created for us on Grandmother Turtle’s back — and that land in turns need us now.
That story, and its many variations across this ancient land mass, is part of the reason this continent is known as Turtle Island. Part of it is because, from an aerial view, as it extends from the Arctic Circle down to Central America, its form and shape resemble a turtle. Yes, our ancestors knew millennia ago what these lands looked like from the skies; I leave it to others to tell the stories of, or to the reader to imagine, how and why that was the case.
It’s a story that has always captured Wings’s own imagination. His people’s origin stories are different, but just as I can honor and believe in those, so, too, can he do likewise for those of my people and our various sibling and cousin traditions. Turtles also have their own role in his people’s ways, if different from my own, and their forms and shapes and spirits have long formed a part of his work.
Today’s featured masterwork is one such, and one that takes a form substantially different from most of those he’s created over the years. It’s a necklace, like most of them, but this features two extraordinary cabochons, each of it which has its own role to play and stories to tell. From its description in the Necklaces Gallery here on the site:
Turtle Island Necklace
Algonquin Woodland peoples know the ancient story of how the First People were saved by the gift of Grandmother Turtle’s shell, which is how this land mass came to be called Turtle Island. Wings honors not just her gift but her very being and spirit with this necklace, featuring articulated head, legs, tail, and beautifully marbled shell all bound together and cascading from a strand of jeweled beads in the shades of earth and water, sky and silvery light. Her head is formed of a beautifully complex cabochon of chrysocolla, emerald and seafoam greens arising from earthy black matrix and accented with flashes of indigo, bezel-set and trimmed with twisted silver. Her body is a truly remarkable cabochon made of a single slice of natural pinecone, wafer-thin and embedded in a layer of resin aswirl in shades of translucent emerald green and black. Sterling silver pattern wire in a molded floral pattern with echoes of Art Nouveau styling create her legs, arched outward form her body and ready to move, while her tail, like the slider-style bail from which she hangs, is a flared triangle of sterling silver, stamped freehand. She dances from a cascade of ultra-high-grade gemstone beads, two old natural chrysocolla cabochons bisected by a single orb of iron pyrite at the center, flowing into spheres of highly polished ocean jasper in two sizes, flanked by long jet barrels and alternating with sterling silver and iron pyrite accents. Moving upward, the beads form a gradients of greens and blues, electric green chrome diopside and softer jade flowing into blue spiderweb turquoise in two sizes, all set off by iron pyrite flanked by sterling silver, with tiny diamond-cut sterling silver anchors at either end. Beads are strung on ultra-strong tri-ply foxtail coated in silver for color and held with sterling silver findings. Bead strand hangs 23″ long, excluding findings; pendant including bail is 3-5/8″ long; without bail, 3″ long by 1-7/8″ across at the widest point; bail itself is 5/8″ long by 5/8″ across at the widest point; round setting is 1-7/16″ across with a cabochon of 1-3/16″ across; oval setting is 1-3/16″ long by 1sts 5/16″ across at the widest, with a cabochon of 1″ long by 3/4″ across at the widest point; turtle’s pattern-wire “legs” are 1/8″ across (all dimensions approximate). Close-up and full views of pendant shown above, below, and at the link.
Pendant: Sterling silver; chrysocolla; pinecone in resin
Beads: Old ultra-high-grade chrysocolla; iron pyrite; jet; Pietersite; ocean jasper; sterling silver;
chrome diopside; jade; blue spiderweb turquoise; diamond-cut sterling silver
$1,400 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The turtle’s head in this piece is a not-quite-perfectly-symmetrical oval, but a true oval all the same: egg-shaped, and in that, it seems to hold within the power of birth and rebirth. The stone itself is spectacular, chrysocolla manifest in unusual colors and patterns, with marbled shades of seafoam and jade, forest and emerald, the latter two infused with the faintest hint of blue. Unlike more ordinary chrysocolla specimens, though, this has only one tiny patch of blue, right near the top — an intense shade of deep, electric turquoise, like azurite as it often manifests in malachite. The matrix is brown-black, a mix of veining and stippling that creates the appearance of stands of alpine conifers extending into great and sacred lakes.
The body is formed of a cabochon that made by human hands of materials both natural and otherwise. It’s a wafer-thin slice of a pine cone from one of those conifers, immersed in a beautiful blend of emerald green and jet black resin, like our mountain forests at twilight. The resin, in turns, limns the edges of the cone beautifully, seeming to gild it so that each glows in pale gold relief, and at the center, another spirit sacred to our ways makes an appearance.
Do you see the eagle, aperch at the center of the forest?
The stampwork is both subtle and bold at once, perfect for the pattern wire that forms the legs, and perfect to make the cabochons pop. The beads were all hand-selected explicitly for this work, designed to pick up every color that appears in the cabochons, and also to evoke the whole of Turtle Island, land and seas, mountains and sky, and. our beautiful, extraordinary light.
Because, of course, nothing works without the light. It warms the earth and allows our plant relatives to grow; it joins with the leave and needles of the trees to give us nothing less than breath itself, respiration, of the land, the plants, the animals, ourselves. And in this place, at this season, it provides us with staggeringly breathtaking beauty, too, a medicine for the spirit as well as the body.
Even on days such as this, when the sun is mostly veiled by clouds, when a rising wind begins to strip the fiery leaves from the limbs, when we know that the first snow hovers just around the corner now.
We are blessed to be sheltered by earth and light, to be granted life and breath by this world that sustains us.
It’s time for us to return the favor now.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2024; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
