Much as I love the storm, even I am glad to see the sun today, if only for the warmth. Now that April is here, even I have had enough of winter, although I know that there will be more of it to come before the cold is through with us.
Yesterday, the storm hovered near the full day, only finally departing, mostly, with the sunset. Even then, the land held an eerie, haunted quality: iron gray clouds against a violet sky, lit seemingly from within by an antique rose color; black tree trunks and still-bare silvered branches arrayed against them in gnarled formation, as if to fend off something just beyond sight. It was so demonstrably this land and yet so seemingly not — unfamiliar in a way that whispered of darker forces held only barely at bay, yet still held there, unable to touch this place and all the angrier for it.
It is, of course, a metaphor for the land whole and entire these days; has been, for lo, these five hundred years now and still counting. But even before the first invaders, our peoples knew well of other forces and other worlds, and these threshold seasons serve to remind us of their existence.
They also serve to remind us that power is, and it is distinguishable from authority or control; and that even those forces that hold within them the potential for great destruction not only birth great beauty, but possess an immanent beauty of their own.
And even now, the sun has returned in force: from yesterday’s storm, clarity and warmth; from a violet blue, a flowering silver light.
This week has been this far a week of stormy blues, and today’s throwback feature is no exception, although its focal points vary ever so slightly. Where yesterday’s work was wrought in silver and onyx and the indigo-to-cobalt shades of lapis lazuli, today’s is built around a different stone. It looks like lapis, at first glance: a deep and powerful blue, one with mysteriously whorled surfaces and hidden depths.
But it’s something entirely different.
We’ll begin, though, with the work’s backstory.
It’s not a throwback of long standing; only as far back as the earliest days of last November. It was one in a very special commission of eight separate works for a dear friend: three small dress belt buckles, three Warrior Woman pins, and two pairs of earrings. Each piece needed to fit the spirit of a different recipient, and we worked closely with her to design patterns and choose stones that suited each person well. Of the two pairs of earrings, we’ve already featured the tiger’s eye set in this space. The other pair was intended to be similar in size, shape, general design, and overall pattern, yet distinctively belonging to the person for whom they were intended. Our friend noted that blues would be welcome, and as it happened, Wings had a perfectly matched pair of largish oval cabochons in a rich, deep blue . . . sodalite.
Sodalite differs from lapis lazuli in some fundamental ways. As I wrote of it nearly five years ago:
Today’s gemstone is sometimes called “the poor man’s lapis,” but there’s nothing “poor” about it. It’s an extraordinarily beautiful mineral called sodalite.
Sodalite is found in igneous and metamorphic rock formations. It’s one of a class of minerals known as tectosilicates, a reference to their physical structure. Such minerals are divided four basic categories, which are then further subdivided into a variety of subgroups. Sodalite belongs to the category known as feldspathoid, which means that they possess some of the characteristics of feldspar, but are not identical to it; one significant difference is that their silica content is much lower than the levels found in feldspar. What it does possess in abundance is sodium, hence its name.
One subgroup of feldspathoid tectosilicates is the sodalite group, and it includes both the mineral that shares its name and a variety of other minerals, such as lazurite. Like sodalite, lazurite manifests in an intensely royal blue color, and both stones are sometimes mistaken for lapis lazuli, for azurite, and for each other.
However, while sodalite is best known as a brilliant indigo-hued gemstone, it also manifests in other forms and colors. Sodalite generally will fluoresce under certain kinds of light, but one variant known as hackmanite, a stone containing significant amounts of sulfur, is marked by a quality called tenebrescence: It changes color when exposed to sunlight. The colors differ depending on the stone’s point of origin, no doubt a reflection of the minerals in the host rock: For hackmanite from Ilímaussaq, Greenland (where it was first “identified” in contemporary terms), or from Mont Saint-Hilaire in Quebec, it appears in varying shades and intensities of purple when first pulled from the earth; after exposure to sunlight, the color fades to shades of white tinged with green or gray. Hackmanite mined in Afghanistan and Burma (Republic of Myanmar), however, demonstrates a near-opposite dynamic: It appear off-white when first mined, but exposure to sunlight turns it shades of pink, red, and purple. Ultraviolet light, particularly the short-wave form, speeds this process of color transformation, and under such light, some of it appears orangey in hue.
Other sodalite that does not share hackmanite’s powers of tenebrescence appears in a broader range of colors, from a translucent absence of color to shades of white, in greens and yellows and browns and grays, in a variety of pinks and purples, and, of course, its most common color: a brilliant, intense, almost pure blue. The blue form often appears with a mottled, speckled, webbed, or swirled matrix, which may manifest in whites and grays (much like denim lapis), or in shades of pink and rose. An example of the latter appears at the top of this post.
Wings has acquired a couple of truly spectacular giant freeform cabochons of sodalite in its archetypal shades: rich deep cobalt blue shot through with warm rose and off-white matrix. That is its most popular form. The less valuable forms tend to have only a chalking-looking white matrix to it, and the blues are duller. Some specimens, however, have only the slightest hint of other colors, appearing in layers of swirling blues, deep, dark, and mysterious. This last form was the one this pair of cabochons took, and they did indeed look like a concrete, miniature manifestation of the storm.
In other words, to someone like me, they were beautiful on a spiritual level.
But for most people, the storm is not something to inhabit, much less to permit to inhabit one’s own spirit. The storm is something to go through or get through, in order to live the light on its other side. If humanity does well, it recognizes the role of the storm in making possible both the light and the world flowering beneath it.
And today’s featured throwback work served as a perfect of embodiment of all of its aspects.
Having been quite literally present when Wings designed each of the items in the larger commission of which these earrings were a part, I can attest that the size and shape of the design were set first, the stones were chosen second, and then the earrings were built around both elements. Each earring was formed of a sizeable oval of sterling silver, cut freehand, hammered flat, and milled smooth. Wings did not, at this point, create the bezels, only noted, freehand, where the center of each would sit. He then turned his attention to the stampwork.
The other pair of earrings in this commission featured tiger’s eye cabochons — spectacularly chatoyant, with a look and feel and sense of motion of flames tracing up and down the orbs of fiery suns. The stampwork he chose for them took the form of a “rays of light” motif, a design that suited the stones perfectly. The deep blues of this pair of sodalite cabochons, however, did not lend itself so immediately to motifs of lightness and brightness; what appear, surrounding stones the shade of fire, as rays of light might easily be mistaken for rain when set around the colors of the storm. And unlike me, most people do not find rain consonant with ideas of “light” or “bright.”
And so, Wings chose a combination of motifs for this design: one that hinted at rays of light; one that spoke to its result. He began with the former, a straight-line chisel-edged stamp tolled with tiny teeth-like marks that ended in small points, like very small rays of light along a horizon. This he stamped around the middle of each oval medallion, roughly half-way between the center and the edge, on an oval that would track both the medallion’s edges and the exterior edge of bezel and stones. At the space at which he arrayed them, it took twelve stamps connected at their edges to complete the oval.
And the stroke of genius, of pure inspiration? He inverted the stamp. Instead of rays of light, they would become roots: Instead of “teeth” pointed upward and outward, like the rays of a rising sun stretching toward the sky, they pointed down and inward from the stamp that would be placed atop them, a clear line from the flowering of the earth rooted inward to the water provided by the storm.
And the stamp that he placed atop each one, connecting its ends to the ends of each chisel line, did indeed “flower.” Like many of Wings’s stamps, it’s an image of great utility, one that can, in context, hold any of several different meanings: rising rays of light; fanned or bonneted eagle feathers; or, as here, the flowering of the plants of our natural world, decorative, edible, medicinal. Once again, he chased the same stamp around each oval a dozen times in a repeating pattern, setting each flower squarely top each “root system.”
Only once the stampwork was complete did he turn his attention again to the stones. For each, he fashioned a low-profile, hand-scalloped bezel, each formed directly to the contours of the stone it would hold (since the two cabochons were roughly identical in size and shape to the naked eye, but not perfectly symmetrical in actual fact). Once formed, he soldered them securely into place, then drilled a tiny, perfectly round hole in the top of each earring; these holes would hold jump rings, to which the earring wires would be attached. He then oxidized the stampwork and the join between bezel and earring, and buffed them to a medium polish — smooth, silken, shining, but not so bright as to detract from the depth and design of the stampwork or the beauty of the stones. Lastly, he attached the earring wires and blessed them traditionally, and they were ready to ship.
They wound up, in their own way, being a work of the storm . . . and of the water and the light and the earth flowering beneath its gifts. Like this day, they are a reminder that from the storm storm comes clarity and warmth and life itself; from a violet blue, a flowering silver light.
~ 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.
