The first official day of spring may be nearly two weeks off yet, but the season’s herald arrived these two weeks past.
This is the windy season, the time of year when the trickster spirits of the air are given free rein to wreak their havoc upon our small world. For much of Turtle Island, this seems like nothing much at all; for those who live elsewhere, “windy” is a day punctuated here and there by the occasional stiff breeze.
This is not that.
New Mexico, like many other parts of the West, spends a not-insignificant portion of the year at the mercy of the gale. To call these days “blustery” is to understate their force by several orders of magnitude, and yet, these end-of-winter days represent a moment of relative calm before the seasonal storm to come. Spring here blows in on winds that can only properly be described as “extreme”: sustained winds up to and in excess of fifty miles per hour; regular gusts that have been known to exceed 75 miles per hour.
And yet, they are normally as dry as ash and bone: no rain, no snow, only whirling devils made of dust that dance across the land, leaving wide swaths of erosion and destruction in their wake.
We are fortunate now that rain is predicted for early next week, a welcome prospect, to say the least. If it materializes, we will live a few days in a vortex of air and water and sky, the kind of weather that, in this drought-ridden year, makes the tempest and tumult worthwhile. For now, we hope, and we pray, because the current gale is arid and bereft of rain.
This day dawned full of hope for rain, a promise itself now scattered upon the winds. But for a few short hours, before the shell of the heavens opened entirely to admit fully the spirits of light and wind together, it appeared that we might spend today in a vortex of air and water and sky. And it reminded me of today’s featured work, one Wings created about ten years ago that sold, if memory serves, sometime in 2009.
It, too, was a shell: a concha, to be specific, one wrought as a buckle for the classic southwestern Native belts of the same name. Wings patterned it after the conchas from one of his older, larger belts, scaled down to a suitable size for more everyday wear. It was created in the iconic traditional shape, the convex oval whence its name derives, cut freehand in a scalloped design all around the edge. He stamped it in concentric ovals around its surface, then turned it over for traditional doming, repoussé-fashion, from the reverse. Then he fashioned the saw-toothed bezel on its face, preparatory to oxidizing and buffing the piece and setting the stone. But its evolution was significantly more complex, and, I can’t help but think, one guided by the spirits.
In this instance, if memory serves, Wings first chose the stone and then built the buckle around it. I don’t mean to imply that he decided to make the piece a buckle; he was already planning that. But where he sometimes conceives, cuts, and stamps an entire piece before deciding which stone(s) belong to it, on this occasion, he had selected the mysteriously deep lapis cabochon shown in the photo before he began to conceive the stampwork patterns.
I know it sound insignificant, this order of things, but it can change the entire outcome of a work. In this case, I think it infused the buckle with a very specific identity.
Traditional concha belt buckles were once almost exclusively fairly consistent in design: large, oval, and often scalloped lightly around the edges — a form and shape worthy of their name, which translates, in English, to “shell.” Wings has long reconceived Native concha belts and buckles to encompass a great diversity of form and detail, giving new life and expression to what was once a relatively uniform genre of wearable art. With this one, he adhered more closely to the old style, but he added his own imprint, as well.
He began with what would be the scalloped edges (most often, Wings stamps such works before cutting them out, which makes the design far easier to handle and keeps the stampwork uniformly aligned). He stamped this in a stylized sunrise pattern, each small arc of rays connected at either end by a single tiny hoop. Ultimately, the piece would be cut around and slightly outside the arc of these stamps to create the scalloped edgework, which in this case provided for scallops smaller in size but greater in number than more usual designs.
Then he moved inward, mindful that the inner rings of stampwork would need to meet two conditions: 1) They must be roughly equidistant from both the edge of the buckle and the bezel that would hold the stone at the center; and they would need to be far enough inward to avoid the lower point of the edge “rays,” where the doming of the surface would begin, with a fair amount of free space left between for contrast. The inner stampwork ultimately formed a band of three concentric stamped ovals, but the center one would be the focus, and needed to be bold enough to anchor the design.
Wings chose an unusual stamp for this oval, a relief design in a pointed shape that, repeated four times across the face of the stamp, creates what are clearly visible scales, like the skin of a snake. Here, snakes represent prosperity; there is also, in the most ancient traditions, a water snake that calls to mind my own people’s stories of the Great Water Serpent. He chased this four-scale pattern around the center of the available surface area in a freehand oval, scales stacked upon scales, eventually forming the image of a water serpent moving endlessly around the center in a clockwise pattern.
Beneath the moving water snake, he edged the inner oval with a different kind of sunrise design, the arc of the rays pointing inward like ripples across silvery waters. Atop the scales, at their outer edge, he added still another ray-like designed, this one slender and arcing high, much like the eagle feathers in a traditional headdress. The contrast between the two types of arcing rays and the sideways-arcing, apparently moving serpent scales created the imagery of a vortex, the eddying whirl of water that is both the water serpent’s home and the form of its moving.
After doming it and soldering the hook and keeper on the reverse, creating the bezel, oxidizing the stampwork, and buffing the piece, it was time to set the stone. This particular cabochon was highly unusual for lapis: Virtually solid in color and free of matrix, it was deep in both color and appearance, a shade somewhere between violet blue and midnight. It was also a spectacularly glossy stone, so highly polished that its surface appeared translucent, producing the effect of mysterious hidden depths. set at the center of this buckle, amid a spiraling water serpent pattern, it resembled nothing so much as a lake, whether the great water that houses my own people’s water snake or the mountain pool of sacred waters that Wings’s people call, simply, Blue Lake. It added, too, to the sense of motion of the piece, whirlpools and eddies and ripples all in one great spiraling vortex.
Now, the waters are low and scarce; our own pond is bone-dry. The clouds above eddy in their own spiral, driven on the rotating winds of spring. They part through the middle of the day to show the sky, a great indigo shell like the one that gave this piece its name.
And if we are lucky, if the spirits favor us, in a few days we will have the rain to go with it.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2018; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
