Our cosmos is more complex, our world more flexible and adaptable and resilient, than we can comprehend. Knowledge of this truth is no excuse for neglecting our responsibility to care for our environment, no justification for conducting ourselves in a manner that continues to inflict harm.
But it is, perhaps, a cause for hope.
The lies of propagandists notwithstanding, we know that we are long past the tipping point. Much of the damage that we collectively have wrought through climate change is now irreversible; some alterations are permanent and worsening, some spirits lost to us forever. Every extinction is a cause for mourning, the death, eternal and unbroken, of yet one more organ, one more limb, one more blood vessel of bone or bit of connective tissue that binds the world together.
And yet, what remains . . . what remains shifts, adapts, alters its stance and changes position and picks up the slack. The spirits who survive also evolve, and together, they are the ones who are braiding earth and sky into an inseparable whole, holding our cosmos together as one being, one living, breathing body made up of still-innumerable souls.
When I went searching for a throwback work for today’s post that would be consonant with the week’s themes, I had no specific piece in mind. We have a trove of thousands of photos dating back a dozen years or so (about the time when we first began recording images of Wings’s work on a regular basis), and while each work is filed away in my own memory, calling them up is not always an instantaneous process. I usually have a few options in mind, and such was the case this week — but when I began searching, among the very first photos I encountered were of what has ultimately become today’s featured work.
This piece dates back to somewhere between 2006 and 2008; if I had to guess, I’d put it at 2006. It was made with one of his old natural turquoise cabochons, most likely Royston, and while I no longer know for sure, I suspect that he chose the stone before designing the band. As always, though, the execution began with the band, and it produced a work remarkably reflective of this week’s overarching themes.
But to talk about the design, I think we need to talk first about the stone.
The photo immediately above is not an especially good one, but it provides an idea of relative size, shape, and matrix detail. It was a perfectly square cabochon of middling size, domed only very slightly, but with beautifully beveled edges and even more beautifully beveled corners; you can see the lapidary workmanship in the right foreground of the photo.
It had been buffed to a fairly high polish, enough to catch the light, but the color and matrix were what made the cabochon. it was a near-perfect shade of robin’s-egg blue, a color not uncommon to Royston turquoise, although it’s perhaps best known for its greener shades. But some of the mining district’s surrounding claims, such as the old Northern Lights mine, were known for perfect pale blue stone shot through with finely webbed copper and chert matrix. One of the hallmarks of Royston stone is the mottled, swirled effect of other colors, such as bright emerald green, that seem to bleed through and from the matrix lines, much as ink from an old fountain pen will bleed on dampened paper. Such was the case with this bit of stone: Rocky brown-black matrix anchored in one corner of the square, spreading outward and turning a bright earthy green, which in turn birthed a spidering map of webbed lines, like the veins of Mother Earth seen from below, silhouetted against the sky.
Sky braided with Earth by way of the band.
Wings began with a single length of heavy-gauge sterling silver, one substantially thicker than that used in the average cuff. It was cut about a half-inch across — enough to ensure a feeling of substance and solidity, not so wide as to make manipulating the silver prohibitive. Because, you see, he had plans for the band that did not include retaining its original form.
First, though, came the stampwork.
He began near the center of the band, what would, when shaped, become the top. Mentally bisecting it down the center, he chose individual stamps and repeated them across the band, as mirror images or opposites of each other. The patterns were varied: human hands reaching upward, cornhusks flowing downward; Water Birds with wings arched in flight; directional arrows bent and broken to signify changes in the path. Together, they represented the various spirits that constitute parts of Mother Earth, the beings who form her limbs and organs and appendages — humankind, plant life, animals and their spiritual avatars, the more ephemeral, esoteric, elemental spirits such as the directions and the storm.
These took up the upper half of the band; at their end, halfway down either side of the cuff, Wings placed a single sunrise stamp, rays flowing downward to expand into longer, larger rays — the sort of rays that illuminate the whole cosmos, the light of the sun and moon and stars flowing from the spirit world to this one. They flared gracefully at each end of the band, and he followed the line of each ray over the band’s termini, chiseling its shape into the heavy silver at each end. it produced a beautifully scalloped effect, giving it form and shape and depth and a sense of motion and light. He then turned the band over and chased a dual lightning-bolt design down its center, merging into pairs of matched thunderheads repeating to either end.
Then, he returned to the center of the band, and from sunrise to sunrise, split it. He then gently widened it, moving from either end of the split toward the center, with the now-two strands at the very middle of the band, what would become its top, spread farthest apart. On the underside, it split the lightning bolts into two, reuniting them at the base where they met up with the stormclouds. He then hammered the whole band gently around a mandrel to give it the necessary arc.
Finally, Wings cut out a square silver setting, ensuring that it was slightly larger than the stone itself. On the reverse side, he stamped an image representing the Four Sacred Directions at the center, surrounded by flowing water motifs that signified abundance. He then crafted a scalloped bezel, soldering it securely to the backing slightly inside its edges — sized to hold the cabochon securely, and to leave room for the next step. He took a length of twisted silver and edged the bezel with it, soldering it into place. Then he oxidized the stampwork to make its depth and detail show, buffed the whole band to a high polish, and set the stone.
The split band, ending as it did in the scalloped termini, produced a flared effect that was only a trick of the eye. Combined with the stunningly mapped Skystone and the stamped spirits of the earth, it also produced an effect much like a braid: a braiding of earth and sky, bound together in one body, manifest in many spirits.
In that way, it summoned the spirit of Mother Earth herself.
~ Aji
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