In light of Wings’s newest masterwork, I thought this week’s #ThrowbackThursday post would be a good opportunity to revisit one of his earlier masterpieces in the same category. Today, we’re going back in time about a decade, to a piece that was very different in form and shape from his usual belt buckle styles, one that was truly one-of-a-kind.
He created the buckle shown above in a Four Sacred Directions pattern, a motif he’s used with some regularity throughout his life as an artist. The symbolism in it is foundational, fundamental, even elemental, and the imagery and meaning have always spoken to him at soul-deep levels.
Sometimes, that imagery and meaning come together in whole new ways.
People consistently mistake this pattern for a “cross.” I’ve written about this dynamic before, about how, in much indigenous work (and in all of Wings’s work), there is nothing “cross”-related or -associated anywhere in it, nothing that bears any trace of the conversionist religion and tactics of the colonizer. No, it’s a much older symbol, one that predates contact stretching back into the mists of time and memory, one that invokes and invokes the power and spirits of the world around us.
So it was with this piece, one built around an astonishingly beautiful central cabochon, deep teal-blue turquoise etched with a bold tracery of charcoal-colored chert, looking for all the world like a map of our world, rising from the waters. As with yesterday’s featured piece, this was a stone that needed a spectacular setting, something big and bold, something embodying the sort of symbol and spirit for which this stone was born of the earth.
The stampwork was equally breathtaking, traditional symbols chased around the spokes, embracing the central stone. The imagery perhaps is best appreciated moving outward to inward, appropriate for traditions built around vortices and origins rooted in emergence. He scored the silver by hand, creating an inner border that tracked the shape of the hand-cut buckle itself. Outside that scored line he placed directional arrows, the stamp evoking the feathered shafts. Each individual image was struck by hand dozens upon dozens of times, chased in all directions, yet leading inexorably inward to the source. Inside the narrow scored lines, he repeated the pattern with smaller arrow designs.
In the center of the buckle, he added another of his favorite images, a symbolically versatile one, the thunderhead symbol. Placed in an alternating pattern at top and bottom, on the spokes reaching north and south, it evokes twin motifs: of rain directed inward toward the center; and of the ancient traditional imagery of the kiva steps, leading downward into the sacred space. At the side spokes, stretching to east and west, the same symbols are deliberately joined, creating a representation not only of sacred spaces but of a world reaching in all directions, to cardinal and ordinal points simultaneously.
All of this work, of course, occurred before the stone was set — indeed, before the bezel was even created. When it came time to set the stone, he crafted the bezel by hand, smooth and spare and simple, as though it, like the world itself, and the gemstone world it would soon hold, arose organically from the center of all things. Before setting the stone, however, he added one final touch: an embrasure of rising suns around the bezel, placed at a slight angle as though conjoined to the bezel itself, repoussé-fashion, an image of emergence out of the darkness, into the light.
I’m reasonably sure that the customer who bought this piece did so thinking of it as the imagery of the cross, Cross with a capital “C,” in the tradition of Christianity.
It’s something much older, something wholly indigenous — to this land, to its people, to Wings himself.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
