As is typical these days, the official forecast has been off by a mile or so. The couple of inches on the the ground at dawn yesterday had melted by day’s end, and predictions for another two to five inches of snow overnight produced exactly zero accumulation. After a late fog moved in again to blanket the land, the rain that had turned to snow in the air melted before it even hit the ground.
Still, it’s a better result than the one for which we had prepared ourselves, and this even despite the intense, unseasonal cold. We were prepared for freezing weather to destroy the gardens, depetal the wildflowers, send the leaves cascading from the trees in a newly brown wave. Instead, the world seems greener this day, summer reborn of snow.
It makes today’s #TBT throwback work an even more perfect fit now. It’s a cuff bracelet wrought in a classic style, a creative throwback to an older style of silverwork, and a throwback of some ten and a half years in terms of its own creation, to April of 2010. It’s vintage form of Southwestern-style Indigenous silverwork that is as alive today as ever, and extremely popular: a slender, heavy-gauge band of solid sterling silver, stamped freehand and set across the top with a row of five stones. As an aside, the use of five stones does not, at least generally speaking, hold any particular symbolic value; it’s an aesthetic choice, one designed to keep stones and silver proportional to each other. Wings has been known to choose other numbers of cabochons — indeed, on one of my own cuffs, he used only three, because it needed to be sized for a very small wrist — but for this particular cabochon size and shape and this particular band length and width, an array of five works perfectly.
For these cuffs, Wings chooses heavy nine-gauge sterling silver: solid, substantial, with a solidity and mass to it that does’t weigh upon the wrist unduly, yet never lets you forget its power. He completes the stampwork while the silver is still flat, and most of the time, his practice differs from most in one significant way: He stamps both outer and inner surfaces, in separate and differing repeating patterns down the band’s full length.
This is the only photo I’ve been able to dig up of this particular piece, although I suspect there are more, shot from other angles, buried on an old hard drive somewhere. But from what I can see of the upper band, I believe he chose a triangular stamp that he uses with some regularity: It consists of three poles, lodge-style, but each open “pole” stylized to a point; conjoined at their open bases, it creates an unusual and also highly stylized Eye of Spirit motif, which is one of his favorites. This he chased all the way down the band’s outer surface; he then turned the silver over and chased a wholly different eye of Spirit design down the inner band, one that you can see faintly on the far side of the photo above.
However, Wings wasn’t finished with the band. He very often takes the stampwork on this style one step further, and such was the case here: clamping it gently in his small jeweler’s vise, he stamps the entire edge on either side. And I’m embarrassed to say that last night was the first time I noticed exactly what he had done with this one (although to be frank, I probably was well aware of it at the time that he created this piece, but it’s been more than a decade, and I had clearly not paid close attention to this part of the imagery when looking at the photo). He chose a crescent line, not quite a half-moon arc, but one that he often uses to represent that spirit of the light, and chased it down either side along that impossibly narrow strip of silver. But he did something different with the repeating work here: Look just above the third (i.e., center) cabochon. To the left, the crescents open toward the inner band. To the right, though? They open toward the stones. And directly above that center cabochon? Wings placed one opening in each direction, one atop the other.
It had the effect of changing the whole tenor of the silverwork, turning what was a simple accent into something that evokes and invokes patterns and cycles, shifts and seasons. Coupled with the cabochons that he chose for the top, each set into a saw-toothed bezel, it created a powerful image of renewal.
The stones are a bit of a mystery by now. Back then, he had amassed an enormous collection of turquoise cabochons in this size and classic round shape, and over time, they mostly got merged together in a group of organizer cases. He sorted by acquisition and then by mine, if known; by color and matrix if not. But over a great many years, they naturally became commingled, and with most of them, mine provenance was long since lost to memory and time. The best we could do, usually, was to make an educated guess based on the stone color, the matrix shades and styles, the textures of the stones.
In recent years, turquoise cabochons of this size and shape, calibrated during manufacture (i.e., cut to a particular shape and size en masse) and sold commercially in parcels, have tended very often to be of Chinese origin. They are mass-produced, far less expensive, and generally have a good strong color and a beautiful spiderwebbed matrix. That was not always the case, however, and much of Wings’s inventory (most of it depleted now) far predated this development. These particular cabochons, in a gentle yet bright seafoam green backlit with hints of blue, with a matrix that was simultaneously webbed in copper and ink shades and patchy with drifting layers of bronze and bright green, spoke solidly of a Nevada origin. The bright green patches resemble Fox turquoise, from what was once known as the old Cortez Mine, but the fact of the matter is that they were most likely Royston, long known for its floating layers of color and multiple manifestations of matrix colors and patterns within a single small stone. These five spoke simultaneously of green earth and hints of blue waters, all coursing and growing around patches of soil and veins of rock: in a word, summer.
And, in another word, or more accurately, a few more words: our world here today, fog-shrouded, gray and cold, yes, but also newly green again, an arc of growth in the cycle of the seasons and beneath the phases of the moon — life defiant, summer reborn of snow.
Winter has not won yet.
~ Aji
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