At long last, we have a perfectly clear day, the early bands of low-lying clouds having burned off to reveal turquoise skies. Even so, it still feels wintry, despite the mercury’s inexorable climb; the winds are fierce, and unwilling to surrender their cold edge, sharp as any scalpel.
Still, it’s nice to think that warmer air might be possible, and soon.
We have, as it happens, been spared the worst of the spring winds, at least thus far; normally, they are far worse on a daily basis at this season than any we have seen so far this year. We have also been blessed with an unusual amount of precipitation lately, and the land is thriving because of it. The long-range forecast predicts more rain over the next two weeks, and if it comes, we will welcome it. Here, rain is medicine: drops of water, of life and light.
It called to mind a work from some dozen years ago. If memory serves, it was created thirteen years ago, and sold in 2008 — one of a small series of five necklaces from that period, all combining stones in multiple shapes and sizes in layered bezels. They were spectacularly geometric, seemingly possessed of both height and depth, with a feeling of stair-stepped invitation about them, as though awaiting, from without, an animating spirit of activity and motion.
This one was a bit unusual for Wings’s work in that period (though in truth, all five were), in that it incorporated stones not much in his use at that time. It was not that Wings did not use other gemstones beyond turquoise (and its common accents, coral and lapis and jet); he has always allowed the designs, and the spirits animating them, to speak for themselves, and if other stones were necessary to that, he would use them. But in that particular period, he was focused mostly on turquoise in all its many shapes and shades, and so adding a couple of translucent jewels of other colors made this piece stand out.
I don’t know, all these years later, whether the design began with the stones or the silver. I suspect it was the former, although precisely which stones may not themselves have been set in stone, as it were. But the execution would have begun with the process of building the silver around cabochons selected for a distinctive shape and size. Together, they would ultimately produce their own layered rain, their own drops of water, of life and light.
I wish we had thought to get a photo of this pendant lying on its side, the better to show that height of the layering involved. It was both lightweight and low-profile, but the layers gave it a distinctly pyramidal feel, particularly with regard to the square turquoise cabochon at the top: It resembled a flat-topped Mayan pyramid, while the sections of the layers holding the two smaller round cabochons reminded me of an inverted from of traditional ceremonial chambers — perfectly round, with seating in circumference, but in this case, requiring one to climb up rather than descend into the underground. At any rate, it (perhaps inadvertently) infused the piece with the feel of sacred space, miniaturized and held close.
This piece required Wings to design in layers, too. If you look closely at it in the image above, you’ll see that the layers differ from each other in significant ways, and he would have had to trace the stones repeatedly to produce each one. The bottom layer encompasses all three stones; so, too, does the second layer. The third layer, however, embraces only the top two stones, the square turquoise cabochon and the smaller round amethyst cab. And the added height of the square bezel for the turquoise cab makes it appear as though it is itself a fourth layer of silver, seated atop all the others, although in fact it is only the bezel.
And so, Wings set the stones atop a sheet of silver on his workbench, drew a small conjoined square-and-smaller-circle combination, then moved the stones to a blank space and drew a slightly larger shape, this time the square connected to the smaller circle, which was itself in turn conjoined to a still-smaller circle. Finally, he repeated the process one last time, extending the lines around the three shapes again slightly more, so that when cut out and layered atop each other, each would extend a couple of millimeters on all sides beyond the one atop it. He then cut each piece out freehand and filed the edges smooth.
Most of Wings’s pieces include at least a small amount of stampwork; this one was unusual, too, in that the only stampwork on it was his hallmark and the “Sterling” notation on the reverse. It was fitting, however; the slender edges exposed in the design left little room, and the added adornment would have detracted from the overall design, rather than highlighted it. It still required a significant amount of solder work, though, and that is often at least as tricky as stampwork. People tend to think of soldering as simply a process element, completely divorced from artistry or even skill beyond the basics of knowing how to wield the torch safely. Nothing could be further from the truth. Not all solders work identically; there are a variety of materials that can be used, and their consistency of application varies even among brands. Too heavy a hand, and you get clumps; too light, and you’ll have breakage. Too much flame, and you get firescale on the surface of the piece. When you have a work like this, with three nearly-identically-shaped layers that need to lie perfectly flat atop each other and yet need to be sealed wholly from edge to edge, skill is paramount. And, in this instance, Wings managed to seal the three layers together, perfectly centered, perfectly adhered, with no unevenness or inconsistency and no risk of separation or breakage.
Once the three layers were fused, it was time for the smaller detail work: jump ring and bail; bezels. He would have begun with the jump ring, this one a slightly-flared loop attached to the reverse side of the pendant at the top. The bail would be fed through this and soldered together, and the beads strung through it. The bail itself he created out of a strip of plain silver, lightly rounded at the edges to give it height and depth and filed smooth, then hammered carefully into shape and fed through the jump ring, with the two ends meeting in the middle at the back. Once this was complete, he turned it back over and, very carefully, fashioned three separate plain, low-profile bezels: the largest, the top square; the middle, somewhat smaller and round; the bottom, a tiny round one. he then oxidized all the joins between the layers, and buffed pendant, jump ring, and bail to a soft, aged-looking Florentine finish.
All that remained were setting the stones and creating the beaded strand. The latter process was simple: He chose a collection of blue-green heishi-style rondel beads, mostly rough-cut and only lightly polished, in mixed shades of blue and green turquoise. These would pick up the blues and greens in the stones, and make for a traditional look in the completed design. These he strung in random fashion, the better to mix the colors and matrices; then he added sterling silver findings to the ends.
Finally, he set the stones. At the top was an old square cabochon of what was mostly likely Royston turquoise, although it could have come from Pilot Mountain or one of the Colorado mines, as well. It was a perfect square, no variance to the sides, slightly beveled at the edges and corners and lightly domed. But what made the stone so striking was its unusual matrix patterns. The underlying turquoise itself was a classic shade, somewhere between robin’s-egg and sky blue with that faintest hint of green beneath. But the matrix manifested in layers — inky purple-black chert spiderwebbing the entire stone, with a veil-like patches of golden bronze seeming to float atop it. These colors would be significant in the choice of the other stones, consciously or unconsciously.
The center stone was a round amethyst in an archetypal shade of purple — clear and bright, with some inclusions deep within the cabochon that seemed in some places to absorb all light, turning it the color of ink, in others, to refract it, a lilac rain filtered through the clouds and the rays of the sun. And finally, the bottom stone, a tiny round cabochon of peridot: a mix of yellow and bronze and olive green, as though capturing the opaque golden layer from the turquoise cabochon and transforming it into a drop of pure light.
To much of the dominant culture, this is Maundy Thursday; we are coming fast up on the day it celebrates as Easter. It’s tempting to say that “apart from its religious overtones,” it is the concentrated essence of spring, but in the pagan tradition in which “Easter” is rooted, there is no “apart”; like the layers and colors of today’s throwback work, the seasonal change of the natural world and the “religious” nature of spiritual tradition are inseparable.
That is true of our own Indigenous ways, as well; earth is spirit and spirit, earth. In these days of spring’s ascension, soil and sky are linked, are nurtured and renewed, by way of the rain, the warmth, the light. They arrive in drops, in scattered showers and and cascading torrents, upon the line of the winds and the rays of the rising and setting sun.
They are life itself, granted to our world, and to us, for yet another year.
~ 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.
