At this hour, the moon still rests high in the turquoise expanse of the western sky. Only two days off full, more than three-quarters of her face is visible, yet she feels suddenly elusive, as though deliberately keeping her distance, ready to flee at any moment.
On this #ThrowbackThursday, it reminds me of one of Wings’s works from some six or seven years ago, a piece that combined one of his very traditional styles with something less so.
The name of this piece was Capture the Moon, a reference to both stone and style. The stone that served as its focal point was a perfectly round, spectacularly beautiful rainbow moonstone: so-called because of its qualities of labradorescence in addition to the more usual chatoyance. We’ve looked at moonstone in depth here before, and as I noted then, the stone, which is a form of feldspar, manifests in a wide variety of colors, some exceedingly rare and valuable. It’s most commonly known for its white form, however, and it is the white variant from which the stone draws its name, for its resemblance to the color and appearance of the moon. One moonstone’s qualities that sets it apart from many other stones of similar mineralogical composition is its capacity for chatoyance, that quality of pearlescent and shimmery striping that lends a cat’s-eye appearance to the stone’s surface. It’s common to ordinary white moonstone, although in some specimens, its presence is less obvious.
Rainbow moonstone, however, is a variant of white moonstone, and it possesses an additional quality: labradorescence. The term is taken from the name of a different gem, labradorite, which we’ve also explored here in depth. It refers to that stone’s defining characteristic of catching and refracting the light in striations throughout the stone, manifesting in a spectrum of colors that augment labradorite’s more muted main color, which is usually a dark dove gray. Rainbow moonstone possesses this same quality: Hold it up to the light at the right angle, and a spectrum of color will ripple through its body, much like a rainbow appearing in the sun over the white rush of water in a waterfall.
This particular specimen was a bit more muted than some examples of rainbow moonstone; it did require one to hold it at certain angles to be able to see the translucent blues and greens and pinks that came and went on the arc of the light. But it had some other, more subtle qualities that made it especially well suited to this piece in particular.
If you look closely at the photos, you can see the marbling effect beneath its surface, much like the whorls and cracks in the ice of a lake frozen solid in winter. Some of those whorls are edged with gold, a warm earthy tone that manifests like the edges of a water stain — think of the design in the fabric of moiré taffeta. It was not actual gold, of course, but it hinted at bits of warm sun-tinged earth amidst the icy surface, and summoned images of precious metals.
It was not, however, the only inclusion in this particular stone.
There is a substance commonly found in moonstone, particularly in its white variants, known as schorl. It’s a German word, one given to a black form of tourmaline. This mineral often manifests in white moonstone in small inclusions, patches and flecks and occasionally more rutile shapes. It gives the stone another form of earthiness, seeming to anchor this ethereal substance to the soil, as though keeping it from drifting away on the winds of the night. You can see a small patch of schorl near the top of the stone in this photo:
Still, the black and gold inclusions resembled nothing so much as the shadowed craters on the lunar surface. The stone looked for all the world like the moon at its most ephemeral: a fleeting and shimmery glow in the sky, one that appears only for a short while, thence to depart as mysteriously as it came.
Wings mounted this celestial spirit upon a slender but sturdy dual-strand cuff, head set firmly in a softly scalloped bezel, then placed upon a body formed of twinned strands of sterling silver half-round wire, each strand stamped with tiny sacred hoops that evoked the full moon’s own shape, flared at the top, then slowly brought together to conjoin at either end.
It saw this piece when it was at that stage of completion, and truth be told, I thought he was done. It was a beautiful cuff, deceptively fragile-looking but in actuality very strong. It was imager that fit our Grandmother Moon well.
He was not done.
He took a length of fine sterling silver wire, incredibly thin, and wound it around the length of the band: a delicate silver lariat with which to catch and hold gently this elusive spirit, as though lassoing a the spirit of a skittish white horse before it can race too headlong across the night sky.
It is not the usual sort of “wire-wrapping” used in jewelry, but then wire-wrap (generally a means of holding stone nuggets fast to suspend them as pendants from chains or thongs) is not really an indigenous style. Some Native artisans do use it as a part of their overall repertoire, but it’s much more common among non-Native artists. It is not something generally seen among the work of our smiths. I can count the number of times Wings has incorporated wire-wrap into a work on one hand, and still have fingers left over. In this instance, however, it was the perfect final detail to finish an already-stunning piece.
Its no accident, of course, that the slender silver thread that “binds’ the band should be so delicate. Any control we have over spirits as powerful as Grandmother Moon is, of course, entirely at her discretion; she cedes a bit of her power to us in the form of the light and the pull of the tides, so that we may harness and use it for our own more pedestrian purposes. But in this instance, it provided a uniquely illustrative counterpoint to power of the moon’s essential spirit . . . and a suitably delicate reminder of our own fragile relationship to the world with which we have been entrusted.
~ 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.
