For this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, we go back in time not very far at all, only a few short weeks back to the holiday season just past. Today’s featured work was a commissioned piece, originally requested by one friend so dear that we regard her as family, to be made for another person family to us both.
It wound up being quite the creative journey.
The original commission began, as these things so often do where Wings is concerned, with nothing more than a price point and a request to do as he saw fit — to create something as Spirit moved him to do. We are fortunate to have a diverse array of clients of long standing, people who are also good friends, who know Wings’s work sufficiently well that they are willing to entrust the entire creative process to him.
In this instance, it took a while.
The original commission was relatively modest in price, with no request even as to type of jewelry attached. Originally, Wings had thought he knew what he would create with it; the person for whom it was intended had expressed an interest in several different things, one of which was one particular design element on a much more expensive piece already in inventory. Another was a particular set of stones stones in his collection, small dark cabs of unusually intense color. He had planned to combine one of the cabs with the motif in question to create a small pendant in yet a third style.
And yet . . . it would not come together.
Days went by, weeks, months, and still the elements remained stubbornly in pieces on his workbench, refusing to coalesce around the original vision. Finally, in exasperation, he set it aside for a time to let his unconscious mind work on the problem.
Wings
always says that Spirit guides his work, that there are times when he can feel it coursing through his hands, directing design and execution. He also says that it is when he ignores it, when he clings stubbornly to an original idea, not letting it evolve naturally, that the work will not manifest properly. And so he’s learned to take whatever time is needed to allow the creative centers of his own spirit to clear, and then reopen to the possibilities that Spirit has in store for a given project.
The recipient of this piece had also expressed interest in another, fabulously expensive stone: one that he acquired at the end of 2014, as part of a much larger collection of nuggets. It is, as far as we’ve been able to determine, turquoise rather than variscite. Its color dictates that it comes from the Dry Creek/Indian Mountain area. It is, very possibly, the original Sacred White Buffalo turquoise.
For us, of course, turquoise is the Skystone, no matter the color: drops of rain fallen to earth and hardened in the heat of the air. In the recipient’s Pagan tradition (she is not Native), water is a central element, making turquoise a natural choice for jewelry that she would wear ceremonially. She fell in love with this particular nugget, huge and heavy and already shaped a bit like a pendulum, and once said that she would love to wear it suspended from a different sort of pendant, one that reflected other aspects of her tradition.
I recalled that conversation, and Wings’s vision for the piece changed. What it produced was the large bold work you see above, one that, given the size and value of the nugget combined with the weight and workmanship of the silver, would have sold on the open market for some $2,500, at a minimum. To call it a substantial increase over the commissioned value was an understatement, but it was his gift both to giver and to recipient.
You can get a sense of the work’s relative size at left, with the chains laid out to their full length. The upper chain, if memory serves, was somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen inches, long enough for the upper pendant to hang at the proper length, like an ordinary necklace. The recipient had mentioned that, were she to be able to afford to commission such a piece, she would wear the nugget as a second pendant, or perhaps more accurately, as a pendulum, wire-wrapped and suspended from the first. That was eminently doable, but it would take a significant attention to detail; given the size and weight and value of the nugget, this could be no ordinary instance of top-held wire-wrap. Nevertheless, Wings knew that it could be done, and he set to work finding a way.
First, the upper pendant:
This design was one that has a specific meaning in her family of traditions, one that had originally been communicated to me by means of a link that was mislabeled. It was not the symbol I had originally thought it to be, and since it is not my tradition, I’m reluctant to go too deeply into its symbolism, although much is written about it and publicly available on the Internet. I’ll note that it is a goddess symbol, one embodied in the phases of the moon, and leave it at that.
Now, the symbolism, of course, is not Native, and its meaning neither translates nor transfers between her tradition and ours. In our way, I can say that such a rendering would share one obvious similarity, that of celestial symbolism: If Wings were to create something Native-themed in a similar shape, it would no doubt represent the phases of the moon, which we regard as our Grandmother, or a sun-and-moon combination.
Once the pieces were cut out and soldered together, the question remained of other adornment. He decided to keep it simple, knowing that their tradition, like ours, recognizes the Sacred Directions as an element. To that end, he chose to manifest the directions by means of a complex layering of symbols: what, in our way, would be a Morning Star, a symbol of guidance, brought into being via four separate, each made from an individual Eye of Spirit. The spokes of the star, the Eyes, are conjoined in the center by means of one tiny hoop, a symbol of life’s sacredness (and, as arranged here, in some other traditions, a pointer to the direction known as the Inner, or Inward).
Wings had originally intended to leave the reverse side free of anything but his hallmark. In the course of creating the piece, he found himself compelled to add one small overlay to it: a flowing bit of patterned wire, in the form of a small silver river. He then attached twin bails, one at the top and one at the bottom, and added to the two chains.
Now came the tricky part — the nugget pendulum:
The nugget itself was an icy shade of barely blue, with just a hint of green underneath. From a distance, it looked more ivory than turquoise, with a warm earthy matrix of gray-brown veins limned in gold throughout. It had a clearly-defined front and back, top and bottom, all naturally occurring, and had been polished only lightly, just enough to give its surface the smoothness of a good worry stone.
It was also incredibly heavy. At the holidays, we spend our days racing to beat deadlines, and neither of us thought to weight the nugget before shipping the piece, but the carat weight would be extraordinary. Most wire-wrap jewelry involves exceptionally lightweight gems, small polished cabochons and teardrops with virtually no weight to them at all, or nuggets of materials that possess no particular intrinsic weight. In such instances, wire-wrapping is easy: All the artisan need do is bind the top of the stone with a few circuits of very fine wire to hold the stone permanently.
This was not one of those stones.
Wings used a much heavier gauge of sterling silver wire to create the wrap: so sturdy, in fact, that it was impossible to do the wrapping solely with his hands; it required the extra torque provided by a pair of tiny jeweler’s pliers to get the strands to curve and turn into a shape that would hold the stone like a second skin.
It also could not be a mere top-of-stone wrap. Instead, he created a cradle of sorts: As you can see in the photo directly above, he twisted and tied multiple strands into a woven pattern, one that would embrace the entire nugget and hold it securely on the reverse. Then, as you can see in the photo just above that one, he brought the wire around twice at the broader top and once at the bottom to ensure that the stone would remain safely in place. In looking at the wrap around both sides of the nugget, I was reminded alternately of the designs of certain indigenous African masks, and of the woven crown-like headdresses worn by medieval European women of a certain wealth and status.
Eventually, each piece was complete, and the whole strung together as shown in the first two photos in this post. It had become, already, a piece of so much more than the sum of its parts. It was one that embodied the recipient’s traditions in her way, first and foremost. But it was also one that in ours evoked and embodied powerful themes, as well: of the heavens and guidance, of the spirits who dwell in those realms and lend light and direction to our days; of the pull of the tides and the powers of the Four Directions, of water in all its forms, whether in the act of falling as rain or already in place upon the face of the earth; of the gifts of our Grandmother, a spirit of the Sacred Feminine.
It was a masterpiece, one that crosses cultural lines. speaking to people of widely disparate origins and for spirits of equally diverse manifestation. Such works become a gift not only to the recipient, but to the creator (and to the Creator, in our way), as well.
~ 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.
