We have spent the week thus far walking the path of the hoop, exploring concepts of circles and orbs and wheels as we go. Yesterday’s featured item is Wings’s first work that overtly embodies the Medicine Wheel, but he has incorporated its concepts as a matter of course throughout his career as an artist. Today, we go back six or seven years to a work that combined the imagery of wheels and winds with the power of the Skystone.
He made these earrings in 2009, if memory serves; they sold in 2010. Originally, I think he sought a vehicle for the matched pair of turquoise cabochons he used as the pendants, but what emerged from the creative process was something very special indeed.
The top of each earring was hand-cut from sheet silver in an unusual pattern representing the Four Sacred Directions — one included not only the spokes laid out to the cardinal points, but also a wheel embedded unobtrusively within the larger setting as a whole. He cut the spokes in a slight flare, excising the hidden shape of the wheel between the points. He then delineated each spoke with hand-stamped patterns at each corner that produced a recessed triangle, forming the full cross shape. Each triangle was edged with a raised hoop pattern, four individual tiny circles that echoed the larger circle formed within the spokes. This was performed by use of a single stamp, one that, when paired with its like at the open end, forms an eye-shaped image: an Eye of Spirit, symbol of wisdom and guidance, of visions and dreams.
That alone made for a beautiful evocation of the wheel, the hoop, the four directions, and Spirit’s eyes. But it needed something more.
Wings chose an especially simple stamp for the next step. It’s a single line, essentially a small chisel blade, and when angled to conjoin at one end it forms a point like the apex of a triangle left open at the base. It’s a design useful in evoking the imagery of mountain peaks, of tipis and lodges, or arrows and arrowheads. He has stamps cast in this shape, of course, but in this instance, he chose to create the image, linked together in a repeating pattern, entirely freehand. In this instance, he used it to summon the spirits of those guardians of the sacred directions, the four winds, all blowing inward toward a powerful central vortex.
In our way, a vortex can symbolize a variety of things, all powerful. That power can be seen as good, bad, or utterly indifferent, but there is no denying its strength and force. As with all power, they key lies in how it is approached, harnessed, used. Handled carelessly or with malign intent, the results can be catastrophic. But approached with humility, honor, and respect, and then handled accordingly, it can be a gift and a blessing, a bringer of healing and harmony and great abundance.
Here, Wings brought together these motifs in a way that expressly invoked the imagery of abundance. In this place, water is life, and there is no clearer, more powerful symbol of that dynamic than the rain. It’s what makes turquoise so integral to the culture here — its very identity as the Skystone, as a bit of the sky itself in the form of rain, fallen to earth and hardened by its heat into a jewel of great value and talismanic power.
And so Wings chose to replicate this symbol of life here, with two brilliant and beautiful Skystones emerging from the vortex to fall like rain.
The cabs were, as I recall, labeled as Bisbee turquoise. Looking closely at the image, I’m convinced that was an error on the part of the seller: They look to me like Pilot Mountain, with that mine’s telltale deep-teal color and intensely golden-brown matrix. Regardless of the mine source, they constituted a pair of the most beautiful matched cabochons I’ve ever seen. The photo is not retouched; the color was fully that intense, and the surface glossier than any picture can reproduce. Looking at them truly felt like gazing into pools of bright blue water, bits of golden plant life aswirl beneath their surface.
They were the kind of earrings to draw you in and hold you fast: into the vortex of the spoked silver wheels, into the still waters of the Skystones suspended below. These were among my all-time favorites of the hundreds of pairs of earrings Wings has created over the course of his career, not merely for the intricacy of the silverwork and the beauty of the stones, but for the deep and powerful symbolism they embody, allowing the wearer to move within wheels and winds.
~ Aji
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