We have spent the month of June looking at the things of the earth in very literal terms, at how the very soil and dust of this place inspires and inspirits its art, its culture, its daily life. In some weeks, we’ve explored its links with other elemental forces. This week, our focus will be, in part, the other spirits with whom we share it.
Over the last two days, I’ve written, in part, about the role that the Pueblo’s very real earth plays in Wings’s work: how it manifests in pieces that embody an architecture of place and people and time itself. Yesterday’s featured item was a current entry in one of his longstanding signature series, the Pueblo pin, a work wrought in the stair-stepped structures of North House, where his family lived when he was born. On Tuesday, I also featured a barrette that embodied the Pueblo in a different way: through stampwork, not shape. Indeed, its shape was much more that of one of the small spirits of this summer season, the butterfly. As it happens, he has also made barrettes in the shape of the Pueblo pins, as well — slightly larger and at least once with a pair of stones instead of one, but with the same layered rooflines, the same saw-cut doors and windows, and the same vigas and traditional ladders.
All of this is by way of explaining the somewhat circuitous route that led me to choose today’s #ThrowbackThursday feature. Because about eight years ago, he created a barrette using an intensely brilliant (if substantially larger) round turquoise cabochon in the same rich blue as that of yesterday’s pin . . . but in the stylized shape of a butterfly.
It was an extraordinarily simple piece visually: a body formed by a center stone, wings flaring out to either side to cover the French clip on the back. When he created it, I don’t think a butterfly was even in his mind — certainly not consciously. He simply fashioned it as he felt led to do, in an arrangement of design elements that came together in an aesthetically pleasing way. It was only when the work was complete that its other, subtler identity made itself known.
Body and wings were cut of a piece, all one: a round center focal point flanged with a gracefully sweeping pair of wings flaring out to either side. They were not, of course, intended to be realistic reproductions of a butterfly’s wings; instead, the edges were hand-cut in such a way as to shorten them slightly at their upper and lower reaches, giving the piece a perfect symmetry and a physical and aesthetic balance.
Wings then hand-scored each wing with long, clean lines, dividing each into six sections: four long slender spaces flanked at either edge by two shorter ones. He stamped a single sunrise symbol at the end of each of the six sections on either side, invoking the light and creating the image of a slight feathery effect.
For the barrette’s focal point at the center, he kept the design complementary and equally simple. He soldered a simple round bezel to its surface, a low-profile one with a spare, smooth edge. He ringed the bezel with more hand-stamped sunrise symbols, eight in all: one pointing to each direction, cardinal and ordinal points alike. Butterfly commands the currents, air and wind alike, and as a spirit associated with the messages of the spirits, and with the force and power of love, she might also be said to carry the light.
Finally, it was time to set the stone. As I recall, he had already chosen the one he planned to use in the piece, a perfect round cabochon of Sleeping Beauty turquoise in the exact color of the desert sky. The stone itself was almost luminous in natural light, the bits of white matrix common to that stone turning the blue nearly translucent.
Once set in the the center of the flared silver wings, the blue glowed like the western sky kissed with the rays of the dawn. It was then, too, that the spirit deep inside the design made herself known: a spirit of this earth that we share, formed out of silver, sky, and sunrise. She would share with the wearer a bit of the spirit of this place, keeping her grounded while allowing her soul to soar.
Her name was, quite simply, Turquoise Butterfly . . . and like her real- and spirit-world counterparts, she carried — indeed, embodied — a message of light and love, of balance and beauty.
~ Aji
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