For this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, we aren’t going back in time very far — only five days, to the Sunday just past. It’s one of Wings’s latest works, and while it may be new, it’s a significant throwback in another way: spirits of earth and sky and beings now lost to the world forever come together as one, ancient dancers in a dance older than time.
The genesis of the pair of earrings shown above goes back several months — and thousands of years. In their present form, they began as an idea: a commission from a dear friend, who wanted a pair to complement a necklace her husband had given her as an anniversary gift. That gift was a gorgeous work in its own right, a sterling silver necklace featuring a pair of cabochons in turquoise and another material, set off with silver spacer beads. The “other material” was a domed and inverted teardrop of fossilized mammoth tooth. She sent me a photo of the piece, and asked whether Wings could make a pair or earrings to coordinate with it — a pair that need not “match,” but merely complement it, with similar colors . . . and materials.
Over the years, Wings has worked with a variety of fossils and fossilized material, but never mammoth tooth. That set us off on a hunt for the material, which turns out to be not particularly easy to find, especially not in a form useable for smithing and gemwork. Complicating the search was the fact that the specimen used in our friend’s necklace was truly spectacular in color and matrixing, gracefully curving bands in a smoky blue-gray atop speckled earth tones. While we found several examples of the mammoth tooth online, they were all nearly neutral in color and lacking in visible matrix, not at all suited to the sort of “stone” she would need.
It took several weeks of steady looking, but one day, an e-Bay seller offered an absolutely stunning specimen for sale. It was a large chunk of fossilized mammoth tooth, gigantic compare to most uncut gems. This one had been cut on two sides out of the host rock, the better to show the matrix present, and had been lightly polished on the the surface.
We snapped it up.
When it arrived, it was more amazing in person than on the screen. It was also enormous, and Wings’s next challenge was to determine the best way to cut it in order to create two matching cabochons out of it. Because of the shape of the specimen, it was clear that he would have to cut a far larger slice than could ever be used for one pair of earrings, and then isolate the portion of the slab that he wanted to use and recut it to create the pair.
All of this took far longer than one might expect. It was a whole new material, and further, it was unstabilized. That’s not a bad ting; it means that the “stone” is wholly natural, and has not been injected with plastics or polymers. But it also means that the materials is incredibly fragile — dry, porous, and dusty. The fossil was formed over eons’ worth of time: As the body and bones of the mammoth, its life and spirit gone, decayed and merged with the earth surrounding it, heat, water, pressure, and time combined to weather the tooth, and eventually, to force other material into the pores of its superstructure. It changed not only its chemical composition, but its color and texture . . . but at bottom, it remained a tooth. That much was evident during the time it spent beneath Wings’s lapidary wheel, an odor that sent me in flashback to the dentist’s chair. Teeth smell the same under a hot grinder, even those belonging to a mammoth thousands of years old and extinct for millennia.
They are also extraordinarily fragile. Wings went through a half-dozen or so separate pairs before he was satisfied with size, polish, and ability to withstand the gemwork process. Several broke during and after the lapidary process. Those pieces that survived he is repurposing into other works, always assuming that they make through the steps to come. [One large sample is going into a new work currently in its final stages right now; it’ll be featured here on Saturday.]
The design tracks that of our friend’s necklace in broad terms — inverted teardrop, round turquoise cabochon, silver bead accents — but the composition is Wings’s own. The mammoth-tooth cabochons were necessarily flatter and also wider at the top, the better to accommodate the matrixing safely. Paired with the sky-blue spiderweb cabochons atop them, they assumed the stylized shape of a human figure, a general outline common to Native jewelry and art from this area. Wings then created sterling silver beads by hand out of poured ingot, a greater number of them arranged in a slightly different pattern that completed the effect of a pair of spirit beings, small silver limbs extending from the figures’ bodies like those of a pair of dancing katsinam.
Attached to wires, they do dance, and their name arose as organically as the materials from which they are wrought: Ancient Dancers, a pair of tiny kachinas who embody the spirits of earth and sky and some of the oldest of beings to walk upon this land.
Their dance is both older than time and also timeless, one that unites us with an ancient past that lives on in the world of the present. It’s the very embodiment of our cosmologies, our understanding of existence as a sacred hoop — a dance with no beginning and no end.
~ 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.
