Today, we bring you four brand-new pieces from our Collectibles Gallery. Tomorrow, we’ll have four more, but they will assume a different form and shape.
Years ago, Wings used to create collectible miniatures fairly regularly: spoons, bowls, pots, flasks. They have traditionally been among his most popular pieces, usually selling out rapidly. A few years ago, he was forced to turn his attention to filling commissions for jewelry pieces full-time during a period of strong holiday sales . . . and never returned to it.
That’s all changed with summer’s end.
Over the last week, he created four new collector’s spoons: three in more traditional “adult” sizes, and one smaller one suitable for commemorating the birth of a child. [Tomorrow’s featured items fall into the category of pottery miniatures, all similarly rendered in sterling silver.]
The three more traditional spoons are pictured collectively above; I took the photo before the baby’s spoon was complete. Each of the four, baby spoon included, is highlighted individually below. Wings has created many such spoons over the years, but these are at a new level.
The first is unique among them all for its shape: It looks more like a contemporary butter knife, but actually harks back to a time when spoons were more rudimentary in shape, less stylized and with less fully articulated bowls. From its description:
In many traditions, the sky is a sacred space, a place where Spirit dwells. Here, Wings pays tribute to its role in indigenous cosmologies with this sterling silver collector’s spoon. It’s a spoon designed the old way, with a subtly shaped oblong bowl, more reminiscent of a butter knife than of its contemporary counterparts, but a style no less functional for that. Here, symbols of the thunderheads, those life-giving spirits who bring the rain, are conjoined down the length of the spoon’s handle, creating a repeating pattern that evokes the sacred space. At the end where shaft meets bowl, a single directional arrow points toward the Guiding Star at the center. Edging the bowl are paired sun and moon patterns, engaged in their own spiraling, orbiting dance. On the reverse, simple five-pointed stars chase the length of the handle. The spoon bears a lightly polished finish, and is 4.5 inches long by 11/16 of an inch across at the bowl’s widest point (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown at the link.
Sterling silver
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
RESERVED
The second is one in a basic outline that he has used in the past, one that incorporates the imagery of the hunter’s arrow with a utensil of daily life. From its description:
Diamond patterns represent Spirit’s own Eye, and here, they send an arrow flying straight and true, directing one’s path from vision to fruition. With this collector’s spoon, Wings honors the fact and the process of dreams and visions and of bringing them into being. The spoon’s handle is hand-cut into the shape of an arrow’s shaft, then edged by dozens upon dozens of tiny individual strikes of a jeweler’s hammer to create a fluted and shimmery effect. Eyes of Spirit trace the center length of the sculpted shaft in a repeating pattern, pointing to an end manifest not in an arrowhead, but in an elegant oval bowl. At the center of the bowl rests a single flower, fully blossomed, created by stamped pairs of stylized hearts and edged with tiny sacred hoops placed at the cardinal and ordinal points. The reverse is unaccented but for a repeating crescent-and-hoop pattern edging the outer shaft. The spoon bears a soft Florentine finish, and is 4-3/8 inches long by 3/4 of an inch across at the bowl’s widest point. Reverse shown at the link.
Sterling silver
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
The third spoon assumes yet another shape, one that flows and flares elegantly, yet embodies something truly ancient. From its description:
In our cultures, this world is not the only one: There is the world of dreams, of course, mediated by the spirits, but there are also the worlds of past and future, linking us with the ancestors and our grandchildren’s grandchildren by way of the unbroken line of life’s sacred hoop. Wings has created an homage to that conception of the world with this sterling silver collector’s spoon. The handle flares slightly at the end, its convexity edged in sunrise symbols. Beneath Father Sun’s glow, a world forms, then traces its orbit down the shaft in a chased pattern of dual concentric hoops. Etched into the bowl, created entirely freehand and free-form via a diverse array of individual stamps, is a trilobite, an ancient fossil whose spirit occasionally shows itself to us in stones, linking us present with a world far more ancient. The reverse is bare of all adornment save a pair of matched stars at the tip of the handle. The spoon bears a gentle Florentine finish, and is 4.25 inches long by 7/8 of an inch across at the bowl’s widest point (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown at the link.
Sterling silver
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
And finally, we come to the baby’s spoon, one in the size and form often used to mark an infant’s birth. In this instance, childbirth is an apt metaphor: It’s imagery evokes the delivery of the First People from the dark womb of the void, tracing the path by which they were ushered through the place of emergence to take their place in this world, the one Grandmother Turtle carries on her back. From its description:
Many Native peoples trace their origins to a place of emergence, a vortex or void deep in the earth or beneath the waters, from which their own First People arose eventually into the light of this world we collectively call Turtle Island. With this miniature collector’s spoon, one designed to mark the birth of a child, Wings pays tribute to this original emergence, and the one we all reenact at birth. Hand-cut and -formed of sterling silver, the spoon’s shaft ends in a representation of Grandmother Turtle, she who ensured the First People’s survival by holding the world on her back. Hand-stamped half-moon and spiral patterns on her shell evoke the waters, their waves and tides and whirlpools. Her tail points down the spoon’s shaft, on which rainclouds chase each other as they send their waters back toward the center of all things: the place of emergence, represented in the spoon’s round bowl by an encircling edge of lodge symbols pointing inward toward a vortex formed of four pinwheeling broken arrows. The reverse is unaccented save for subtle half-moon and water patterns down the length of the shaft. The spoon is polished to a subtle sheen, and is 3.25 inches long by 7/8 of an inch across at the bowl’s widest point (dimensions approximate). Reverse shown below.
Sterling silver
$375 + shipping, handling, and insurance
Speaking of children, there’s an old song from our childhoods, part of a Hollywood musical, that insists that “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.” The implication is that “medicine” is something wholly unpleasant, and if it cannot be avoided, it should be made palatable with a sweet additive.
We interpret the word “medicine” very differently. Our traditions consist of herbal and other remedies, true, some of which are less than entirely pleasant. But that is only the most basic, superficial definition of the word. For us, medicine is, at its essence, spirit . . . and a spoonful of spirit is a welcome gift indeed, one that needs no other additive.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
