Today, we continue our ongoing #ThrowbackThursday series exploring Wings’s past work with a look at a piece that, at the time, was one of my favorites. So much so, actually, that I frequently wore it around the gallery (my habit has always been to choose a piece to wear while working to show customers what it will look like when actually worn, and perhaps to give it a little extra “energy” to attract the right customer; this one I think I “modeled” perhaps a little more than was strictly necessary, but it certainly found its proper home).
In design, it was an extraordinarily simple piece; in execution, much less so.
Wings created this necklace in the old way, all of the smithing done wholly by hand. It harks back to a time when all adornment was made individually, without benefit of mass-produced elements like ready-made bezels and bezel-wire: Each of the nineteen individual stones in this piece is set into an entirely hand-wrought bezel, each crafted from sterling silver and soldered onto the pendant so thoroughly that they appear to rise organically from it.
This is the old way of silversmithing — the way Wings’s own father did it, and his father before him.
Silversmithing done this way is a laborious process, one requiring patience, meticulousness, exactitude. It’s less worried with creating something that has a machine-finished look to it — note the unevenness of the top rims of the bezels, which is what happens when they’re formed by human rather than robotic hands — than it is about holding the stone securely and creating a finished piece that speaks to the spirit.
This one achieved those goals in countless ways.
The arrangement of the stones themselves has meaning. Non-Native dealers in Indian jewelry call them “cluster” designs, and, yes, they do constitute a “cluster” of stones, but that doesn’t begin to describe them with any accuracy or specificity. A “cluster” of anything can be (and frankly, usually is) random in arrangement; it need not have any guiding pattern or natural design to it. But this gemwork pattern virtually always follows a very specific pattern: one larger central stone, surrounded by one or more rings of smaller stones in a more or less circuitous pattern that evokes the structure of a flowering plant’s bloom: Think, for example, of looking down from above upon a small flower’s physical structure, where the ovary/pistil/stigma are telescoped into a two-dimensional center, then surrounded by an array of petals.
But perhaps the clearest example is to be found in a flower indigenous to this area. The sunflower manifests in a large, round, seemingly flat center known as the disc flower, the part of the plant that contains the seedlings. The petals, aptly known as ray flowers, radiate outward from around the disc flower, creating a geometric pattern of a circle within a circle — or, in our way of envisioning it, a hoop within a hoop. It’s what’s known as a blossom design — depending on the region, the stones chosen, and the particular arrangement, they may intended to evoke ordinary flowers. like the sunflower, or cactus blossoms. Wings uses the “cactus blossom” motif in his own work.
Here, the stones were placed as though arising from the earth itself, from the Sacred Directions. The pendant, a hexagonal medallion, was hand-cut from a heavy sheet of sterling silver in a pattern that, via points and planes, pays homage to all of the cardinal and ordinal points of the compass.
It’s a shape that evokes other symbolism, too, that of a shield. Warrior’s shield, medicine shield: Often, the two are one and the same. In this piece, it calls upon the imagery of earth and sky, of the power of the Skystone to water the plants of the earth, urging them up from the soil to flower into lush healing green.
The blues and greens of sky and earth are here embodied in a collection of old natural Royston cabochons, more green than blue, with matrices that range from pale golden bronze to dark chocolate. He hung them from a strand of doughnut beads, rondels of Royston turquoise, many of them also the chocolate-matrix form.
I find myself oddly nostalgic over this piece. Part of it is the old-style workmanship, everything done entirely by hand, the focus on the imagery rather than artificial commercial “polish.” Part of it is the antiqued look and ancient imagery; rather than giving it a Florentine finish, he simply allowed the silver to tarnish naturally to a degree, giving it an authentically-aged look.
And part of it is what it represents: the melding of earth and sky; the flourishing abundance associated with the blossom design; the protective gifts of the Skystone embedded in a pendant in the shape and symbolism associated with medicine, a shield of grass and sky.
It’s a healing piece — whatever the shape and style, Wings’s work at its most significant.
~ 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 owner.
