We’ve spent time lately trying to disengage and disentangle from the colonized identities associated with this month. It’s hard to do in the face of capitalism ascendant and commercialism rampant. Even this week’s official holiday, that for which governmental offices, schools, banks, post offices close, is its own monument to colonialism, one that even at the best, most generous interpretation, leaves our peoples invisible.
It’s what’s invisible to the rest of the world that celebrates those days that interests me most right now: not only our very selves, but the world from which our cultures spring organically, and in which they have lived, immersed, since time immemorial. Whenever outside forces threaten to swamp the rhythm of our daily existence, when I begin to feel exiled from the world of everyone else and attenuated from our own, it is the natural world to which I turn to reaffirm those ancient ties.
I wrote about this, in a manner of speaking, two days ago, and then I focused on what we regard as one of our own “founding fathers,” an ancient peak that towers above us, watchful, protective, as we go about our daily lives. It is indeed a father, old to the point of eternity, possessed of the accumulated wisdom of the eons’ worth of life that its very body has supported.
The mountains are sacred spaces, in both formal and informal terms. Some of their secret places are barred to outsiders by tribal regulations; others are barred to outsiders (defined as all humans) simply by the mountains’ own regulations, their terrain impassable to mere mortals. And yet, we do not have to set foot upon those places to know that they keep our world alive: They collect the waters from the heavens, channel the run-off to us below, and provide a safe haven for the game and plant life that populate the entire ecosystem.
And so, these sacred peaks and the spaces they shelter from outside view, these ancient earthen father figures that stand sentry outside his studio windows themselves figure prominently in Wings’s art. Sometimes it’s a shape, a style, a substance, a symbol; sometimes it’s all of these and more combined. And so it is with today’s featured piece, all and more, melded into one cohesive whole that embodies not merely the peaks themselves but the blessings they channel in our direction. From its description in the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Sacred Mountain Spaces
Here, the mountains are living beings, spirits that stand guard over the people and this land. Their peaks and valleys contain natural kivas, secret sacred spaces where spirits dwell and power takes tangible form. This heavy-gauge triangle wire cuff bracelet, rolled and milled by hand and stamped in a positive/negative stepped pattern, pays tribute to those spaces and the beings that live within. Flowering signs of the Four Sacred Directions, set to the ordinal points, trace the inner band and come to rest against the skin.
Sterling silver
$525 + shipping, handling, and insurance
This is one of those deceptively simple pieces — seemingly plain, perhaps, to the eyes of some. After all, not a single gemstone adorns its solid band, and its finish is subtle and subdued.
It’s neither plain nor simple. Leaving aside the sheer volume of detail work involved in creating the alternating pattern and the microscopic edgework, it’s a perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. The stampwork symbols themselves are freighted with multiple meanings, the matching peaks along the band’s own peaked ridgeline existing within motifs of dual symbolism: seen from one vantage point, the peaks sit beneath the thunderheads that deliver life-sustaining rain; shift the angle ever so slightly, and they are subsumed beneath sets of symbolic kiva steps.
It’s one of the things I most love about Wings’s work: his talent for capturing meaning, translating symbols to stories, channeling the lessons of the ancient spirits to contemporary humans in a language we can understand just as the mountain’s own spirit channels the waters from the sky to us in a form that we can use.
In our traditions, that is perhaps the finest and best that can be said of art.
~ 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.
