After yesterday’s cloudless skies, today marks a bit of a change. Nothing that will bring rain or snow, of course, but enough shirred and wispy bands of white to hint, perhaps, at a coming change in conditions.
The extended forecast suggests that there is no real chance, however small, of anything before next Tuesday. But this land is nothing if not one of surprises, and at this season, conditions can shift from Indian summer to perilous cold and snow in the space of a day.
Where I come from, the waters are big in every sense of the word. It’s even in their [popularly known] collective name: the Great Lakes. They, too, are suffering the ravages of colonial-driven climate change, but each is still of sufficiently phenomenal size to seem like an ocean when standing at its edge looking out over endless waves, no horizon in sight.
Here in this place, our seas are the skies, by turns calm and reflective, then tossed by the force of their own wild weather. These are seas of the spirits, stormy and sheltering simultaneously. Today, they remain largely quiet, but we know they are offering us a warning of conditions to come, extremes of weather not so very far off now.
Today’s skies put me solidly in mind of this week’s featured #TBT work, a throwback only to the July just past. It was a gift for one of our dearest friends, family despite the lack of blood ties, to mark a milestone birthday. The stone was one of a small parcel she had purchased years ago and given to Wings to be used in future work for herself, and it was truly an extraordinary specimen, albeit not one likely to catch the eye most people, jewelers and buyers alike. Her tastes, though, are unique, and she has an eye for special kinds of beauty, and this particular cabochon suited her spirit perfectly.
As I said, she is not related to either of us by blood, but she is family all the same. Her own Indigenous roots are half a world away, beneath vast skies and far across what are often very stormy seas, in a land now known to the outside world as Ireland. Her spiritual tradition is drawn in part from the ways of that land, and it is perhaps no surprise, given the gulf that separates its practitioners from the lands of its varied roots, that water plays a significant role in it.
In that, her traditions and ours are perhaps not so dissimilar, if different in their ways of manifestation.
At the time that Wings created this work, he had just completed the cuff called Cosmologies and was already at work on the one titled The Waves and the Water Serpent. Both are big, bold, elaborate pieces that reflect that matters on his mind at the point in midsummer: water, first and foremost (or more accurately, the lack thereof and its effects upon the land), and a constant watching of the skies, hoping for signs of rain, making offerings to the spirits to help bring our world back into the proper balance.
This work became, in a sense, a link between the two.
The stampwork that gives the band its form and shape and spirit is all formed of a single image: what is most often perceived as an arrowhead point. Even that is not so far off the mark, perhaps, from its usage here; one need only look at the works of the great Indigenous sculptor Allan Houser (Haozous) and one of his most famous works, Sacred Rain Arrow, to see a connection. And it is featured prominently in the detailed stampwork of both of the other two cuffs linked above.
But here, Wings took this one stamp and chased four it up and down the length of the heavy-gauge band in five separate rows, alternating direction from one to the next. You can see the deep regularity of each stamp by the degree to which it displaces the surrounding silver . . . and also see that all of it is done freehand.
And that is not easy.
As you can see in the image above, the silver is thick. I don’t recall the gauge offhand, but it’s substantial. It’s not a simple thing to strike a stamp in it so deeply and displace the silver to that degree.
To do it up and down six inches of band in five separate rows? All with a five-pound solid-steel jeweler’s hammer?
It’s a lot.
You can also see how deep the scorework is that forms the bordered edges of the band. Those were also made freehand . . . with a single stamp, made by Wings himself, that consists of a wide chisel-like blade end. When I say wide, I mean something less than an inch, perhaps half an inch wide. And he stamped it repeatedly, moving forward, all the way around the entire band, as deeply and as uniformly as you see here.
But in the process, the alternating arrow pattern became something utterly different. It became waves.
A sea of waves: rocking gently back and forth. A sea of waves: rolling in swells and troughs, at once battering with all the force of the storm and sheltering whatever rode within it.
Not unlike, perhaps, the experience of our relative’s ancestors as they made the dire and dangerous crossing from that land to this.
Once the band was complete, he shaped it gently around a mandrel to give it the proper arc. Then he set it about creating the hand-made bezel.
As you can see directly above, the backing of the bezel extends just slightly beyond the perimeter of the stone. That’s by design; it gives the bezel a thoroughly solid base on which to sit, and it also provides room to edge the stone with a slender strand of twisted silver, which helps to make the gem “pop.”
But the other thing you’ll notice about the bezel is that it is not attached to the band.
That, too, is by design. With larger stones, there is always a risk that, during adjustment, the solder between bezel backing and band can weaken and fracture. it’s not a fault of silversmithing, but of simply physics: Adjustment, by its very nature, creates a yaw that “stretches” the silver solder link between bezel and band. There is only so much tensile resilience in it, and if it’s stretched beyond those boundaries (or, over extended periods of time, stretched over and over again), there’s also the risk that it will fracture, crack, even break off entirely. And then you run the risk of losing the bezel, and/or the stone.
Wings’s solution, for many years now, has been to elevate the bezel ever so slightly from the surface of the band. If the band is anticlastic, it may require elevation via a [from the side] visible length of sterling silver tubing. On a band with a flatter surface, like this one, it needs only the smallest of pegs, It’s why the focal is clearly separated from the band in the profile image above, but in the one below, appears to rest directly on top of it.
And speaking of the focal, there is that stone still to address.
Earlier, I said it was an extraordinary specimen, and I didn’t exaggerate in the slightest. It’s chrysocolla in matrix. Chrysocolla is one of the copper minerals that, like its cousin turquoise, manifests in gloriously blue-green or green-blue shades of water and sky, but it often differs from turquoise in that the lubes and greens are spectacularly clear; instead of being included with webbings of matrix, they instead include into the matrix itself. Such is the case with this specimen.
If you look at the top photo, you’ll be able to see, very faintly, the shearing effect of the matrix itself: sheet-like layers of dark brown-black material. Think sandstone, shale, slate, mica: Such materials stack and layer atop each other, and flake apart similarly, too. Their “stacked” construction provides space for other minerals to include over time on a geologic scale, allowing heat and pressure and weathering to do their work. In this instance, the stone likely came from a deposit in Arizona, and consists most likely of blue-green and sky-blue chrysocolla included into layers of siltstone and tenorite.
The result produced a jewel that looks for all the world like its own fully-contained stormy seas: an ocean in microcosm, tossed upon the waves of the band, and yet sheltering all that ride within them. Together, stone and silverwork (and the ancestral journey and spirit of its wearer) gave the work its name: Seas Stormy and Sheltering, a tribute both to the perils of the crossing and to the waters that kept them afloat and alive.
On this day, it feels, too, like a tribute to our skies. They are sheltering now; perhaps they will also deliver the desperately needed stormy weather soon, too.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2021; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
