The day cannot decide whether to cede credit for the haze to smoke or storm. For the moment, we have both, and and a pale heavy sunlight, too, none of which has thus far managed to accomplish anything beyond turning the air mildly oppressive. That air is hot enough to bleach the sky, a turquoise as pale as the green in fields now fast going brown.
We need rain, and soon. We need to make a space for the water: in our work, in our prayer and ceremony, in our politics and praxis.
Such thoughts brought me last night to the work shown above, this week’s featured throwback. It happens to be one from my own collection of Wings’s work, which is likely why it hadn’t occurred to me to post it in this context previously. But in a week when our representations of water are filled with the sharp edges of a dry and warming land, it seems well-suited to both theme and more fundamental needs.
This piece dates back some ten or eleven years — to 2008, if memory serves. It was one that Wings created originally for inventory, then decided instead that it should come to me. It was relatively small, as his barrettes go, and yet it’s sturdy enough to hold my roughly three feet of hair within its clip.
It was also remarkably simple in design, yet just as remarkably powerful in its execution.
It began, if memory serves, with the stones: He had the matched pair shown here, slightly larger than the average square calibrated cabochon in its general size range, and possessed of unusual color and texture. He wanted to keep them paired, and settled on making them the focal point of a small, slim barrette.
Once the stones were selected, he turned to the silver. With barrettes, there is a relatively small spectrum of gauges available to the silversmith: It needs to be heavy enough to hold the hair without bending unduly or breaking even as it must be lightweight enough not to pull the hair and flexible enough to take and hold its curving shape. If I remember correctly, this one is wrought out of eighteen-gauge silver, very sturdy and solid.
First, Wings sketched the outer edges onto the silver, roughly delineating its ultimate size and shape; the height of the barrette would need to match the height of the stones, once set into their bezels. Then he chose a single stamp and struck it in an alternating directional down the exact center of the piece. It’s a motif that I think the manufacturer meant to be relatively abstract, evoking the feel of both blossoms and perhaps directional arrows, but in Wings’s hands, it takes on the distinct image of a Water Bird: beak pointing skyward, wings arched and spread, tailfeathers fanned out in upward flight. It was this symbol that he turned upon itself in alternating fashion, so the beak of one met the beak of the next; that one’s tailfeathers then joined up with the tailfeathers of the third; that one’s beak touched the beak of the fourth; and so on, all across the band of the barrette. It made for moving imagery, as though exponentially magnifying each Water Bird’s inherent power by its relationship to the next of its kind.
Once the stampwork was complete, he cut out the barrette itself, filing the edges smooth and shaping the ends, rounding the corners slightly for comfort, and flaring them the tiniest bit to accommodate the hair. Next, he placed it upside-down on his anvil and gently hammered it, repoussé-fashion, into a gentle arc. At this point, it was time to attach the French clip assembly, placed at the center of the barrette’s underside, a quarter to a half an inch inward from either end, and soldered securely into place at each of those ends. He then turned it back over and set to work on the bezels.
As noted above, he had two matched square cabochons that he intended to use. Most often, with smaller cabochons in geometric shapes, they are what is known in the business as “calibrated”: machine-cut in lots to exact size and shape, so that each cabochon in a given lot has exactly the same dimensions and is perfectly flat and level on its underside. It provides Native silversmiths with much greater access to materials and much more flexibility in design, and thus in the prices they can afford to set; calibrated cabs are, generally speaking, much less expensive to acquire, typically making the end product less expensive, as well.
These were older cabs clearly from the same deposit, natural, without treatment and with full texture evident to sight and touch, and they appeared to have been cut by hand to the same size and dimensions, but not to machine templates on either count. They were also relatively highly-domed, with not much of the stone lost on the beveled corners. They appear slightly greener in the photo than they are in real life; based on color, white host-rock stippling across the stones, and the coppery-red matrix, we think they are old light green Bisbee, which is a lot less common than the blue.
Wings fashioned two like bezels, side by side but not quite touching, with the smallest of spaces in between. These bezels were scalloped, but still relatively low in profile, the better to set off the rounded beauty of the stones’ surfaces while still holding them securely. These he soldered firmly into place; then he oxidized the joins between bezel and barrette and the stampwork, and buffed the piece to a medium-high polish. All that remained was to set each cabochon and bless the piece.
Occasionally, a pin or barrette assembly will prove faulty, and need to be replaced. Such was the case with this French clip; shortly after placing it into inventory, he noticed that one end of the clip was sprung slightly. He pulled the piece, carefully removed the old clip, and after some testing, replace it with a new one.
And then he presented it to me, a gift of Skystones and Water Birds, and what has been, to me, always a reminder to make a space for the water.
It’s a lesson by which I live.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
