At the end of Tuesday’s post, I featured one of Wings’s works from some six or seven years ago: a pair of simple silver slab earrings that were, in fact, not so simple at all.
They contained no stones, no stampwork, true. They were all and only sterling silver. But what them what they were was a silversmithing technique called ajouré, a French word for “saw-cut.”
And they were, from the moment he made them, one of my favorites.
This week, we’ve looked at a great many ways in which Native artists honor the spirit of the corn. It is, after all, an ancestral sustaining spirit that is, if not universal to our peoples, very nearly so. It has kept our collective bodies alive, and our spirits, too: through art, medicine, ceremony, prayer.
And while it is mostly a fruit of the summer earth, I always associate it with this time of year, with the harvest season . . . and with the Indian corn whose brilliant colors have always been, in spirit, part and parcel of the month and day of my birth.
So perhaps it’s no surprise that I should have fallen instantly in love with these earrings. No, they don’t contain the gemstones that so attract my attention, much less any of the colors I associate with what I have always regarded as our corn. But they are unquestionably an homage to the plant itself, and to its spirit.
I noted above that these were an example of ajouré work. Wings has a set of jeweler’s saws, and an array of “blades,” fine diamond-cut strands that look like nothing so much as old Eversharp leads, but are far finer (and far sharper). They are also fragile; it’s easy to break them in the process of cutting, so their use requires attention and care.
And in a work like this, in which the cutwork is to remain entirely self-contained within the bounds of the piece, it requires extra care and skill.
He began with a thin yet fairly substantial piece of sheet silver, cutting and trimming a pair of slabs some inch and a half to two inches long, filing them down to ensure smooth edges and a good match. The cutwork required for larger works often leaves not-insubstantial pieces of silver, too small for most uses, yet too large to discard. While he always turns in his scrap silver in trade, with somewhat larger pieces, he often uses them to make small items like these — and, in fact, one year he made a whole series of smaller slab earrings out of scrap silver. This pair, however, was a bit longer than those in his later series.
His next step was to draw, in rough form, the corn plants themselves. He uses a black felt-tip pen; their ink adheres well to the silver’s surface, but can be buffed away rapidly, easily, and entirely should he be dissatisfied with the result. Once he had a general outline for the two corn stalks, he then pierced each slab and began the laborious work of cutting out the design. It’s not as simple as just cutting out an ordinary shape; this design is composed of lines of varying lengths, widths, and curvatures, and a slip can mean a hole instead of a line in an instant.
In this instance, he formed a pair of dancing corn plants, arising organically out of a mound of earth (which is, incidentally, the traditional way of planting corn here). He moved up the stalk, joints bending first this way, then that way, leaves draped over like elegant hands. It gave each image a sense of motion, as though each plant were swaying in a gentle breeze.
Because he cut each corn plant separately, and did the work entirely freehand, they are not mirror images of each other. This was by design. He could easily have made them into exact duplicates of each other by temporarily gluing the slabs together, back to back, and cutting through them simultaneously. He has done that when the cutwork in two pieces needs to form an exact mirror image. But corn plants are like people, even the identical twins among us: They may begin from what seem to be identical kernels, but as they emerge and grow, they become individuals, each with their own characteristics. Corn plants from the same set of kernels will grow at different rates, with differing numbers of leaves and ears and eventually husks, and will not necessarily grow and bend in the same direction. So it was with these.
For this pair, a bit unusually, he cut the original slabs in such a way as to incorporate built-in jump rings into the top of each. that way, once finished, all that remained was to attach the wires, and there was less risk of losing an earring, with fewer points of attachment. A quick filing of the cutwork to smooth it, and then a soft buffing, not high-polish but brighter than a Florentine finish, and the earrings were complete: Cutwork and corn.
Sometimes simple is best. Sometimes it’s also the most powerful. In this instance, it was a perfect way to honor the spirit of the corn.
~ 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.
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.
