It’s snowing.
Not just a little snow; no, this is a constant fall of great heavy flakes, the kind that accumulate on contact. We’re under an actual winter storm warning now, complete with cautions about possible white-out conditions and advice to stay off the roads except in direst emergency.
We’re happy to comply; chores are done, fires are burning in the woodstoves, and we’re warm and content. It seems that others are happy with the weather, too; the birds are flocking to the feeders and the dogs are romping in the drifts. Meanwhile, the cascade of white still falls: first from the southwest, now the northeast, a constant dancing shift in direction and degree along the storm hoop.
It’s hauntingly beautiful, and indescribably welcome. Oh, it will get bitterly cold tomorrow, and there will probably be high winds to make it colder still. Then we have a week of intermittent thaw and the resultant mud to look forward to, as well. But above all else, we have the gift the land needs most now: a last dance for the medicine at winter’s end.
This week’s #TBT embodies the medicine and the dance and the circle all in one. It’s a ring — what at the time we probably described as a “men’s ring,” but which in fact is a ring for anyone (and our policies in how we describe Wings’s works have changed accordingly to reflect a more factual understanding of gender and identity) — that is a throwback probably to around 2009 or 2010. Based on the composition of the photo, I’m inclined to date it at one of those two years, but I also seem to have some vague memory, more recent, of this having been a commissioned work. I have not, however, been able to track down the external drive that holds the original photo, whose metadata would pin the date down to year, month, and probably even day.
But regardless of its creative genesis or eventual destination, it’s a beautiful work, one wrought in a very old traditional style that is weighted with both substance and symbolic power.
It was called Storm Hoop, the name a reference to shape and stampwork — the outer band consisting of conjoined thunderhead motifs, the inner band traced with tiny hoops, and the ring, in point of fact, a perfect hoop shape itself. But it began life as a single straight length of sterling silver triangle wire of a very heavy gauge: probably four-gauge wire, actually.
Yes, triangle wire. As I’ve noted here so many times before, “wire” is simply a term of art, not an accurate descriptor in lay terms; it refers to long, slender lengths of solid metal that are formed by pouring molten ingot into long molds, then cooled, opened, and cut to whatever length is desired. They range from the thinness of a glassine filament to very heavy, blocky molds some fraction of an inch across. Their shapes vary widely, too: round, half-round, square, triangle, pattern, bead, twisted. Triangle “wire” is just what it sounds like, a length of solid metal (in this case, sterling silver) with three sides of the same size, the two upper sides sloping upward to a sharp apex, the bottom side perfectly flat. If you look at the end of it, it looks like a triangle (or, perhaps more accurately, given its solid mass, a pyramid).
And you’re looking at the photo and wondering where the triangle is.
You’re right. The apex is gone: flattened, the silver displaced to either side. Sometimes, Wings (or the client) wants a solid, heavy piece, usually either a ring or a cuff bracelet, with the sloping sides you get with triangle wire, but with a nice flat surface, sharply edged, as would be the case with square wire. There’s an easy way to get both, and by “easy,” I mean conceptually so. The execution is much more labor-intensive.
Wings created the unusual surface shape of this ring by cranking the heavy silver wire through his rolling mill. It’s done entirely by hand, the only power that of elbow grease, and it requires both physical strength and steady hand to do it. The rolling mill contains channel-like grooves that hold the silver in place between the two round mill plates, and how he adjusts the height (the distance between the two) dictates the shape that will eventually emerge. In this case, he kept the plates lower than the height of the triangle wire, pushing the apex downward as it was cranked through. It displaced the silver sufficiently to create the flat surface you see here, leave the gradient on each sloping side beneath it.
Once the silver was milled into the desired shape, he set the length on his workbench and began the stampwork design. He kept this one very simple: the old traditional thunderhead motif, paired at open bases, the narrow ends meeting the pairs on either side. It created a chased pattern down the ring’s outer surface that seemed too embody the storm, while paying tribute to the sacred directions in the process — medicine, life, our world itself — and honored the ancient architecture of place, the kiva steps and crenellated parapets of thousand-year-old multistory homes. Along center of what would become the inner band, he stamped a repeating pattern of tiny round hoops, along with his hallmark.
Stampwork complete, Wings then chose a mandrel and a mallet and began gently hammering the silver into shape. It takes a while with silver of this heavy a gauge, because you want to form it carefully, not creating too sharp an arc too rapidly. Once he had formed the proper circle with it and was satisfied with the size, he clamped it into a small worktop jeweler’s vise and soldred the ends seamlessly together.
Solder work complete, he then would have placed it on the mandrel once more and hammered it lightly into shape one last time, to ensure the smoothness of the arc. Then he would have oxidized the stampwork and buffed it — here, to a soft, slightly aged polish, a finish perhaps a shade or two brighter than a strict Florentine.
All that would have remained was to bless the ring and either offer it for sale in our regular inventory or ship it to the client who commissioned it. As I said, based on the composition of the photo, I would have guessed the former . . . but I suspect that this was in fact a commission dating back to 2014 or so, and he simply replicated the black velvet background and stone staging right in his studio. That was a spectacularly busy year for us, and with the records packed away and the hard drive as well, I’m reduced to guesswork via an admittedly faulty memory.
It was, however, one of those old traditional styles that I so dearly love, a classic form and shape infused with a powerful symbolic spirit. And it’s a spirit that’s animating our small world here again today, the storm hoop, a last dance for the medicine at winter’s end.
It’s a gift, and we are grateful.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
