In spring in this place, all of the elements come together to create life, an alchemy as old as time itself.
The forecast predicts wind today, that artifact and arbiter of this season in this place. In most years, the wind is spring’s defining characteristic, air as exponent, the element in extremis that serves as breath of life and driving force simultaneously.
In most of the country, the focus is traditionally on earth, in the watch for green emerging from the brown; on water, in the form of spring showers, even on fire, understood as the warmth of the sun. Air? Air is a side note.
Except here. Here, the spring air is something more fully actualized; it assumes tangible form, demands primacy and power, strikes out on its own but takes all else with it.
The wind is capricious, destructive, cleansing, illuminating all at once. It obscures and uncovers, an endless pulse of integration and dissolution. It speaks for the soil, sings for the storm. The wind is a conjurer, first hiding, then exposing, then becoming the voice of the light.
The light is the wind’s partner in this elemental dance, a spirit that willingly lengthens both duration and shadow to allow the world to live again.
But the light inhabits all places, from the ephemeral lodgings of wind to the transitional spaces of fire and water to the permanence of the earth itself. In this place, the earth is like tiger’s eye: It contains its own light. The light here comes from mica, wafer-thin sheets and sherds that catch the sun and refract it back out to the world, adding illumination to otherwise dim spaces and hidden places.
It’s a union that finds expression in today’s featured work, one of Wings’s newer pieces. From its description in the relevant section of the Bracelets Gallery here on the site:
Earth and Light Cuff Bracelet
The earth warms and grows beneath the light. Wings honors both with this cuff made of sterling silver triangle wire, slender but solid. The apex of the band is accented with dozens of small stamps, rows and rays flanked on either angled side by a chased pattern of rising suns. At either end, the band is hammered into a smooth oval disc angled gently inward. At the point where the apex begins to slope downward, each side is set with a tiny round cabochon of soft green jade, the color of new grass, nestled in a saw-toothed bezel. Beneath each jade cab rests a brilliant oval cabochon of tiger’s eye, also set into a saw-toothed bezel, each stone the warm rich brown of the earth, shot through at the center with a chatoyant line of golden light. Other views shown above and below.
Sterling silver; tiger’s eye; jade
$825 + shipping, handling, and insurance
It’s a work that assumes the form and shape of the light: a crescent of rays studded with smaller rays, like the sunrise summoning the green from an earth newly aglow with its warmth.
It’s a work that sings for the season, for clear air and warming winds . . . and for the light.
~ Aji
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