We’ve been looking this week at how art brings the light: catches it, holds it, reflects and refracts and disperses it, delivers it to us to warm our world and make visible our path. It’s long been a frequent theme in Wings’s work, via which he regularly honors the light-bearing spirits of the skies, the sun and moon and stars, and the rainbows that transform the light into art of the very air itself.
Sometimes, such tributes are not merely metaphorical.
About two years ago, a dear friend who is also a client contacted us seeking to commission several pieces at once. She is slowly, over a period of years, amassing a collection of Wings’s work, but not for purposes of displaying it in a case or on a shelf. Rather, she wears it, and regularly, drawing strength and support from the motifs and symbols that he knows carry special meaning for her. She slowly builds her collections in miniature around different gemstones: necklace, bracelet, earrings, ring, barrette, whatever else she requires at the time.
Two years ago, her particular focus was on moonstone.
There were various reasons for her to choose moonstone at that particular time, some aesthetic and some deeply personal. It was an honor for Wings to be entrusted to be entrusted with translating that focus, and the underlying symbolism, into works that she would wear on her person in a way that brought her happiness.
At the time, he had a number of small moonstones in his inventory, and put a few larger ones on order from a supplier in Mexico. The ones on order were large ovals, unusual in appearance, without the regular chatoyance common to calibrated cabochons: They looked like ice, with inclusions made by water and pressure that formed a matrix like the cracks on the surface of a frozen lake at the beginning of the thaw. But of those in his inventory, one, a medium-sized cabochon, stood out above all the rest.
This one.
It’s rare for him to find moonstone cabs in any shape beyond round or oval. This one was decidedly rectangular, yet with corners that had been polished into smooth arcs rather than sharp angles. The cab itself was domed beautifully, higher than usual and cut in such a way that it refracted the light constantly. And that refractive quality transformed it from an ordinary white moonstone into what is known as “rainbow moonstone,” a variant of the white form in which its mineralogical make-up combines with it physical structure to function as a prism, sending rays of pink and violet and bright blue light outward from deep within the stone.
I’ve written here about moonstone before, about its variant forms and its symbolic associations. For this particular commission, its links to the imagery of the moon and to motifs of the Sacred Feminine were especially apt. It was a given, then, that such a spectacular stone would be the focal point of the piece. but Wings chose to support that focus in a way that was simple, and simply inspired.
Light comes to us in different ways. The sun’s is direct, if filtered by distance an atmosphere (and a good thing, since without such filters we would never be able to withstand its power). The moon’s, on the other hand, is indirect: The glow it furnishes to the night sky is in reality a reflection of the sun’s harder, stronger gaze; it is, in effect, a mirror. And then there is the brightly-colored light that accompanies the storm: the rainbow, a result of the dispersal of the sun’s rays through droplets of water — a natural prism, with water as the collective lens.
Seen in this way, the imagery came to clear to him as though hand-delivered by Spirit . . . and he set to work in c rafting it by hand. He began with the band, as yet unshaped, and chose a starting point at the very center. From there, he hand-scored the band in a radiating pattern of lines, tight at the center with interstices expanding as they reached the edges. It produced an effect like the rays of a celestial orb.
On the inner band, he scattered thundercloud images at random, the stormy masses that midwife the rainbow’s birth. In this place where water is life and the rain is sacred, the imagery of the storm is likewise a sign of abundance, of the gifts and blessings of Spirit, and so it was fitting that such symbolism should be placed against the wearer’s skin.
But he wasn’t done with the band yet: At either end of its outer surface, he added motifs of Spirit and Medicine in the form of a hand. Each hand was cut freehand from a thin sheet of sterling silver. He then took two delicate lengths of solid copper wire, heated them, and fashioned them into a pair of spirals: clockwise, the direction in which the sun, the source of the light itself, appears to move across the sky. [Yes, I know that is not a scientifically accurate description of the movement of sun, moon, or earth; we’re talking here about immediate perceptions, unaided by technological hardware.]
The copper spirals, themselves an invocation of the life cycle as we envision and understand it, as a sacred hoop, we soldered onto the hands as overlays. The hands, in turn, were overlaid onto the ends of the cuff, across the rays of light.
Finally, it was time to add the bezel and shape the band. The backing itself was simple in the extreme, with inly the slightest edge extending beyond the boundaries of the stone. He held the stone fast in a scalloped bezel with a very low profile, the better to allow the moonstone’s domed surface to rise and display its show of colorful light. He then trimmed it in a length of fine twisted silver, just substantive enough to set off the stone without distracting from it. Finally, he blessed it, as he does with all of his work, seeking an infusion of the power of its represented spirits, and of Spirit, to the benefit of the wearer.
The cuff complete, we sent it off to its home with our friend. Two years later, I still receive the occasional note from her, when something big and/or important is going on her life, letting us know that she’s been wearing it (and the other pieces that were a part of this collection), and that she draws strength and power from them.
That? That’s a gift to Wings. What more can one ask of one’s own work, than that it bring to others spirit and light?
~ 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.
