It’s a smithing term: Repoussé. It comes from the French, the word repousser, meaning to push up, to push outward, to push back. Trace it back far enough, and you eventually reach the Latin infinitive, pulsare, “to push” (you can see the root of the English word pulse in it).
It’s the adjectival form of repoussage, a smithing technique in which a metal surface is hammered, or otherwise pushed outward, from the inside, the reverse, the obverse, creating a relief effect on the front or top side. It an be used for very small individual bits of metal, which are soldered at the edges onto a base surface as an overlay, or can be the form given to the central piece itself.
In Indian jewelry, it’s a technique commonly seen with the Southwestern concha style of silversmithing. The word concha is Spanish for “shell,” and refers to a distinctive medallion-style shape evocative of actual shells. It’s a topic we’ve discussed here at length already, along with its etymology, meaning, pronunciation (KŌN-chah only, never KAHN-cha or KAHN-choe), and uses. It appears most often in traditional concha belts and buckles, but can also be seen in hatbands, earrings, pendants, barrettes, and other forms of wearable art.
Today, the conchas used on belts and as buckles take a variety of forms, but the classic form appears in an oval shape, generally scalloped around the edges, making each medallion convex, with a slightly domed surface. The doming effect is what is created through repoussage, by shaping each medallion from the underside with strikes on an anvil. Extremely small individual repoussé shapes, such as those used as overlay accents on larger pieces, may be created with individual stamps.
Today’s featured piece, shown above, is a good example of repoussé work. From its description in the Buckles Gallery here on the site:
Like the sun bursting open in the Pueblo sky, this concha-style belt buckle blooms like a summer flower. At the center rests an oval cabochon of old natural turquoise, surrounded by raised repoussé “rays” edged by sunrise symbols. Additional hand-stamped sunrise symbols accent the buckle’s scalloped edges.
Sterling silver; turquoise $480 + shipping, handling, and insurance
What is perhaps not obvious at first glance is that in this case, the effect occurs in two layers: The entire piece is lightly domed to give the medallion its traditional concha shape; then, within the central oval, it’s domed more sharply. This creates an enhanced inner background that is then bisected by deeply stamped lines around the smaller oval, forming individual rays that stand out in sharper relief.
And it’s the effect of the rays that give this piece its name: the impression of a sunburst, pushing outward, opening like a flower, each ray ending in individual petals fluted and scalloped and stamped with their own miniature symbols of the dawn.
It speaks simultaneously in multiple tongues. It’s complexity, convexity, sometimes simply vexing.
Repoussé aubade is the phrase that echoes in my soul, that I hear inaudibly but with such stark clarity. It’s what I imagine the French would name it, if they possessed a parallel concept like those that lives in our own peoples’ traditions and lifeways. Whether the French do recognize such a phenomenon, much less whether the phrase itself actually exists in their lexicon, I have no idea. It is, to borrow another of their words, a bagatelle, a triviality: The phrase came to my soul’s ears unbidden, of its own accord, and I regard it as yet one more example of how words and concepts and language variants ebb and flow and merge together to embody something that perhaps inheres in only one language, but that all can nonetheless understand.
An aubade is a morning song: variously, a song to greet the dawn, or a song between two lovers parting at sunrise. The former fits squarely within many of our traditions, in which people rise quite literally to greet the dawn, whether with prayers to help the sun on his way across the sky; with a literal song, as that sung by the Hopi katsina called Morning Singer, whose role is exactly what his name implies; or with a simple word of thanks to Spirit for the blessing(s) of another day.
In its own way, perhaps, the latter fits, too. For peoples whose traditions call the sun Father and regard the moon as their Mother, dawn might indeed be seen as a parting of the two lovers, the last moment when their respective worlds of day and night will touch, like two linked yet parting hands, until the meet up again a half-day hence at sunset and their worlds merge and mate again for a brie and beautiful moment.
Pushing up the sun, pushing out the sky, pushing back the day into its proper place. For people whose world requires them to do their part to help the sun return and make its traverse across the sky each day, it’s its own song to the greet the dawn.
~ Aji
