This week, we’ve been looking at some of Wings’s work through elemental lenses, tracing the arc of the sky itself. It’s home and host to Spirit, and to innumerable gifts, spiritual and tangible alike.
Today, we look at a piece that captures a tiny little sherd of that sky, small enough to hold in — and wear on — your hand.
Its name is Crackling Sky, a nod both to imagery and to sensation, to the sights and sounds and feel of the sky and wind and air at the dawn of a gathering storm in the high desert. As I said last fall when we first introduced this piece:
It made me think of the piece in the photo above, a brand-new piece whose description I would normally associate with our late-summer monsoons, when the weather can change in the beat of a bird’s wing, and when Nature is wont to scheme with the winds and the thunder beings to mount a collective show of force, a dazzling display of elemental powers. From its description in the Rings Gallery here on the site, and viewed from other angles:
Sometimes the desert is positively electric, alive with the force and power of the elements. That vibrancy in the very air itself is captured in this stone, brilliant blue shot through with coppery lightning bolts of matrix crackling across its lightly domed expanse of “sky.” Hand-stamped drops trace both halves of the scored band like the much-needed rain. Cabochon is 1/2″ square (dimensions approximate); band is sizeable. Other views shown below.
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Air, Water, Earth, even Fire: It’s a manifestation of the heavens in miniature, a tiny vaulted sky of pure blue, turned to rain, driven to earth on the winds of the storm, hardened by the heat of the soil. It still bears the imprint of the crackling bolts of lightning, themselves taking the more tangible form of red copper melded with black chert — Earth and Fire again wedding themselves to Air and Water amidst the storm, brought together on the very breath of Spirit itself.
And all of these elemental powers, come together in one small stone, are supported, nurtured, fed by the imagery of Wings’s stampwork: tiny individual raindrops, each applied meticulously, individually, by hand, evenly spaced with tiny a tiny hoop placed at the cardinal directions, a reminder of balance and harmony.
And beneath the stone, on the back of the bezel where it holds the band secure, a star pointing to cardinal and ordinal points, whence come the winds that bring the rain from the sky.
Protection; strength; harmony; abundance. It’s a small piece, yes, but an unusually powerful one for all that, one that captures and harnesses the powers of the elements in small enough proportions to be safe for mere mortals to hold . . . and even to wear.
~ Aji
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