Not even midday, all signs of rain vanished from an unbearably hot forecast, and already there has been a fire on the mountain.
It seems to have been extinguished, although the victims of last year’s Hermit’s Peak/Calf Canyon Wildfire Complex, a megafire that set state records for size and duration alike, can testify to how weak assurances of that really are. Both of those, plus a wildfire in the Jemez last year, all occurred explicitly due to colonial (and official, governmental) negligence.
So while the smoke plume seems to have disappeared, we will be watching that area carefully throughout the day.
It seems as though our prayers these days are devoted almost entirely to pleas for rain — and it seems to be no small task, even for the spirits, to draw down rain from an intermittently stormy sky. Elsewhere in the world, a stormy sky is interpreted as a symbol of hardship, of obstacles to be surmounted or crises to be navigated. Here, it’s nothing less than a sign of medicine.
And it’s what inspired this week’s #TBT featured work, a throwback to a little over five years ago, in March of 2018. This one was very special: Someone who is very dear to us commissioned it as a gift for someone else who is very dear to us. All that the first friend specified was that she wanted it to be a cuff (and I believe she wanted turquoise), whatever Wings could manage within a specified budget.
Given who commissioned it, and who the recipient was to be, Wings threw all thoughts of “budget” out the window and set to work.
In this case, if memory serves, the design began with the stone. Some years previously, Wings had acquired several small parcels of natural turquoise originating various mining districts, from Arizona to Nevada to Colorado. The stone he chose for this work was, I believe, from one of those parcels, although all these years later, I can no longer be sure precisely which one. As you can see in the image above, the stone was a large oval, the material a hard, bright, perfect turquoise blue, that blue tht some call “sky” and other’s call “robin’s egg,” and in this case, both seemed a perfect fit. The matrix is what causes the uncertainty.
At the time he acquired the parcels described above (probably five to seven years prior to the creation of this piece), a couple of them were sold as originating at Turquoise Mountain in Arizona. Back then, they were unusual for that source, which was better known for this same bright blue, but with unicolor spiderwebbing as its common matrix. Stippling of white host rock, as you see throughout this stone, was more common to Kingman (also Arizona; although now such stippling is appearing in material from Nevada’s Fox Mining District). What was distinctly uncommon? The bronze and inky purple patches. Based on those alone, I would have been more likely to identify this stone as from Nevada’s Pilot Mountain District; purple and bronze against this deep electric blue is one of its hallmarks.
That said, I just don’t know. My best guess is that it is either indeed Pilot Mountain turquoise, or the new[ish] patchy bright material coming from Turquoise Mountain. Either way, given its size, it was a valuable stone, and one eminently suitable for such a commission. Wings created a scalloped bezel for it, the backing extended just enough to edge it with twisted silver.
The band was another matter.
It’s my belief that Wings had already decided to place the stone on the horizontal when he designed the band, which turns out to be perfect for the band he actually created. It’s what’s known as a dual-strand band, formed of two heavy-gauge strands of sterling silver half-round wire (and as I’ve noted repeatedly previously, “wire” is simply a term of art for metal molded into long, narrow segments, then cut and sold accordingly; it bears no relationship to what most people think of as “wire”).
In this instance, he cut two strands of equal length and laid them flat upon his anvil. Half-round wire is exactly that: convex on its outer surface; flat on its underside. What that means is that stamping the outer surface requires special care to accommodate the arc of the wire without missing a strike or ruining the pattern. It’s perhaps easier with smaller stamps (although they require more repetition if the bad is to be covered end to end). here, though, Wings chose a single large stamp, itself in the shape of an arc, a radiant sun emergent from clouds.
First, he repeated the stamp down one strand, the arc facing the same direction down its full length. Then he turned to the second strand and did the same, but with the arc facing the other way. After adding his hallmark on the inner band, he placed them side by side, with the arcs turned opposite directions so that, taken together, the clouds were inside and the embrasure of the sun on outer side of each strand. Then he soldered them seamlessly together at the ends.
Once that task was complete, he began shaping the band. It’s done by placing it agains a mandrel of appropriate size and gently hammering the band around it with a mallet, always turning the silver so that each portion of it is shaped evenly. Once he had the arc he wanted, he turned to the focal, which required him to spread the top center of the two strands gently apart to just the right width to accommodate the bezel backing:
Once the focal bezel was added, I thought he was done. Imagine my surprise when I came outside later to photograph the finished piece, only to find that he had added two more bezels: a small round saw-toothed bezel on the outer surface of either end.
These he set with highly-domed Labradorite cabochons, a perfect embodiment of the clouds at the center of the stampwork on either end, seeming to extend upward to clearing blue skies at the center.
It was perfect imagery. Our friend who was to receive the piece had been going through some extraordinarily difficult times, as the other friend who commissioned this work well knew. Wings knew it, too, and it made the addition of the tiny “rainclouds” at the ends, leading to the bright blue of the focal stone, all the more meaningful.
It’s one of the anomalies of living where we do that the very symbologies of most other places, the signifiers of rain and storms and clearing skies, actually hold the opposite meaning for us.
Especially now.
Last year’s megafires were only one deadly aspect of this even more deadly megadrought, a record not seen here in more than twelve hundred years. The disparate lands where the two respective friends involved in the creation of this work live are facing other manifestations of climate collapse — sometimes involving too much rain, other times, not enough. But this work suits all three regions, both of theirs and our own: a reminder that ran from an intermittently stormy sky, and such a sky itself, can be dangerous . . . but it can also be medicine.
For both our friends (and for ourselves), we hope for medicine now.
~ Aji
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