For this week’s edition of #ThrowbackThursday, we travel back in time some three and a half years, to November of 2012. at the time, Wings had acquired some sheets of copper, and while sterling silver is his customary medium, he decided it was time to put the fiery-looking precious metal to use.
In truth, Wings has long used copper as an accent on larger works wrought in silver: a few beads here, a copper spiral there. But up to that point, the only all-copper work I can recall him creating was a slender round-wire cuff for me to wear on the wrist that gave me the most arthritic grief. Since that time, he has made me additional cuffs that I wear on both wrists when the pain is flaring particularly badly. But in late 2012, he made a few for sale in the gallery, as well.
The others were anticlastic cuffs, all gracefully sloping angles and spare and simple surfaces. But one he fashioned into a slender version of a classic cuff bracelet, complete with traditional stampwork in symbolic patterns.
The result was this cuff: Finding Water.
When he created the piece, I can say unequivocally that the dowsing properties of copper wire when it comes to finding buried water lines were not in his mind, although he does own a copper dowsing rod. He was looking at the metal through a more comprehensively elemental lens: one that recognized and acknowledged copper’s relationship to earth, air, fire, and water, all four. Nonetheless, in retrospect, its name seems especially apt in practical terms, as well.
Interestingly, copper often comes up in discussion when tourists visit the gallery, in a way that is perhaps unexpected: in the context of Taos Pueblo’s micaceous pottery. Most first-time visitors have never laid eyes on it before, nor on anything else made of mica clay, and when they first see it on a shelf, gleaming in the sunlight, it looks to them very much like metal. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve been asked whether our artists’ pots are made of copper — a question which then, of course, necessitates a discussion about the properties of the local clay, from the golden-red earth to the mica that gives it its precious shimmer.
In this instance, Wings called upon equally ancient aspects of his tradition to create the cuff. First, he cut the band by hand, a narrow strip of copper that flowed like one of our local tributaries, its waters lit red by the sunset sky. He then stamped it, freehand, in a chased pattern of conjoined thunderhead symbols, images of the great clouds of summer that bring the gift of the rains, facing each other and linking up to form a deeper symbolism. Once conjoined, the symbol used for the thunderhead effectively creates to other traditional symbols, one used by many peoples, the other specific to his own and the related nations of this region: first, a symbol of the united and unifying Sacred Directions, with spokes arrayed to the cardinal points, adjoining corners stretching toward the ordinal points; and second, another unifying symbol, one edged in the distinctive design used in Taos Pueblo pottery to represent kiva steps, the single entry to the sacred space.
At either edge of the band, Wings then separated each sacred center symbol with small arrowheads pointing inward, a reminder to look to the center of all things for the sacred, for direction — in a land where water is life in very literal terms, for life itself. He then oxidized the stampwork and gave the entire work a simple Florentine finish, producing the antiqued appearance of lightly brushed copper, ancient symbols aged to reflect their long and time-honored history within his culture.
The cuff now resides with a friend who lives on the East Coast, in a land where water assumes a central presence and important role in daily life. It also, perhaps, carries its own healing properties, a mix of elemental forces that infuse body and spirit.
In a week and month in which we are getting back, in very real terms, to the things of the earth, copper fire for finding water seems to hold the very air of this place: direction, healing, life itself.
~ 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.
