Spring here wears many robes: those more properly belonging to winter, those of summer, and occasionally even the sharp clear air of autumn; those of storm and smoke; those of clear hard skies and a trickster wind; those of water and those of fire. It’s not that the season cannot decide who or what it is; this is both who and what it is.
In what we still consider more “ordinary” years, such as this one, the latter half of spring is the time when irrigation begins. We are not usually granted much rain this time of year, certainly nothing like what this year has brought us, but our “norm” includes brief but periodic snows, and substantial runoff from the peaks.
It is also, improbably, the burning season.
That can be defined in two ways. What I meant by the statement, first and foremost, is that spring is the time of readying for planting, which means preparing for irrigation; that in turn means cleaning the extensive ditching system that sends the water flowing across the fields. That means hard labor, yes, plenty of digging and trimming of red willows and pulling of smaller weeds, but in this place, where bindweed takes over by summer’s end, sprawling across every available inch of surface only to die the small death of dormancy in winter? Burning is also required.
But not on a day such as this.
Today, we have true gale-force winds, blowing at a steady forty miles per hour, with gusts expected to exceed sixty. This is the kind of weather that turns this into the other sort of burning season: the beginning of wildfire season.
Fortunately, our earth here is far more wet than it was last year, far less combustible. For us, the only fires now are those safely encased in the woodstoves, just enough to ward of the trickster wind’s chill. But the waning weeks of spring are a season of flames, in more ways than one.
Today’s featured work, a throwback only to last November, is a manifestation of the gifts of this season (and of those of the autumn in which it was created): the feathers and flowers of a red earth, and yes, the flames of it, too. This piece was a very special commission by a family member, one that grew expressly out of another work Wings had just created using a stone from the same deposit. The stone is called Red Creek jasper, and he had used a pair of matched teardrop cabochons in a pair of earrings given the name Night Fire. Our relative does not wear earrings, but she does wear pins, and she had been particularly taken with the colors and patterning of the Red Creek jasper. She commissioned a brooch-style pin using the same stone, one of which Wings happened to have in a rectangular-shaped cabochon, and this was the result.
The design process for this piece was rather interesting, at least to me as a steady observer. It began, obviously, with the stone in this case, since she specifically asked him to build the pin around it. But oddly enough, the silverwork also took shape almost immediately, as though the design had been buried in his subconscious, waiting for the relevant stone to present itself to the recipient.
It was a design that was very much not typical in shape for such a piece, and yet it was also one that harked back to a much older traditional style, from a hundred years ago and more. It was not precisely vintage-style, as the contemporary market interprets that phrase today, and yet, it was wrought very much after a “vintage” tradition. It’s the sort of shape that one might have seen a century ago worn by Native men and women in traditional dress, a brooch pinned at the throat of a shirt or blouse, or perhaps to keep scarf, shawl, or sash in place. It reminded me of a butterfly, one elongated not on the vertical but on the horizontal, wings outstretched from a solid central body mass.
I cannot say what led Wings to choose the shape, and I doubt he could tell you now, either. I can say that I saw him cut it out, freehand, in long, rounded, flowing shapes, out of silver of a fairly substantial gauge. Once cut, he filed the edges smooth all the way around, then set it face up. On the reverse, not shown here, he had originally cut out of the center two flared angular shapes that met in the middle, like butterfly wings turned at a ninety-degree angle to the pin’s orientation. I think perhaps he had originally thought to let the back of the stone show through, only to find that it needed a more solid backing to set it properly in the bezel. At any rate, he retained the excisions, which produced a sense of meta layers in the geometry of a small winged spirit, wings within wings. Perhaps it would become a symbol of all that such spirits carry to us, as messengers, as symbols, as bringers of the gifts of the elemental forces.
Right side up, he then set to designing the stampwork. One of the reasons I feel confident of the immanent butterfly motif is the stamp he chose to edge the entire piece: a tiny geometric butterfly, all miniature sharp angles where the pin’s overall shape was rounded, edges softened. This tiny being he chased in a repeating pattern a millimeter or two inward from the pin’s edge, all the way around it.
First, though, he added two singular stamps at either side: the repoussé hearts that appear in the point of the cleft at either side. This relates to the other aspect of the piece’s shape, which lay in its evenly rounded edges, like hearts conjoined, end to end, and laid atop each other. Butterflies are, after all, messengers of love in some traditions, and the two motifs complement each stylistically as well as symbolically.
Once the repoussé hearts were in place, he added the butterfly border, dozens of strikes to place them evenly around the pin’s perimeter. Then he chose a plain stamp, one like a tiny chisel with a slightly crescent-shaped end, and texturized the entire surface within the butterfly border (and outside the edges of the repoussé hearts). Again, this represented scores (perhaps even hundreds) of strikes of the jeweler’s hammer, and the result added texture, depth, and a sense of age to the piece. Lastly for this stage of the work, he chose a plain heart stamp, and rendered four of them on the “wings” of the piece, each arrayed in random fashion at the ordinal points.
Stampwork complete, Wings turned the piece over and added his hallmark, then attached the pin assembly. He then turned it face up again, and set about creating the bezel. In this instance, the cabochon was only lightly domed, but the corners were beveled on this a fairly sizeable, solid stone, and so it needed a bit more security than a plain bezel could provide. He fashioned a scalloped bezel for it, the better to grip the edges of the cabochon, and set it on a plain silver backing and soldered it into place. He then trimmed the entire bezel in a delicate strand of twisted silver. Silverwork now complete, he oxidized the joins and all of the stampwork fairly substantially, the better to bring out the texture and imagery on the finished piece, then buffed it a to a medium polish — not so glossy as to look brand new, not so muted as to look artificially aged.
Then, it was time to set the stone. And Red Creek jasper is a fairly spectacular stone. Wings still has several pieces of it left, some of them matched cabochons designed for necklace-and-earring sets; its colors vary from pale ivory to a yellowish tan to shades of brown and gray to deep brick reds aswirl with charcoal-colored matrix. It’s a stone that is reportedly sourced to China, from an area where the local name allegedly translates variously to “Red Creek” or “Cherry Creek,” and it’s a beautiful material. Some sources insist that it is not jasper at all, but dolomite, while others regard it as a hybrid — a mix of dolomite and jasper, in much the same way that azurite and malachite are often found together in the same stone. I regard the latter explanation as the most likely, given the way this material manifests: Dolomite is known for the bold streaks and thin bands of matrix present in the material I’ve seen, while jasper’s matrix is often patchier, like the larger blocks and whorls that appear in the same specimens. Dolomite also tends to have a coarser, denser texture, while jasper takes a very high polish. The piece featured here contains all of these qualities simultaneously, as do the other specimens in Wings’s inventory, and these pieces span the stone’s typical color spectrum. The colors are often autumnal, but the reds look like fire.
Stone set, the pin was complete. All that remained was to bless it and send it on its way. It arrived at the end of November or the earliest days of December last year, when the chill in the air was growing steadily and fire was required for warmth. Now, the cold is on the wane, although you wouldn’t know it here by today’s wind temperatures that have already exceeded the projected high nonetheless feel starkly cold in the face of roaring fifty-mile-an-hour winds. Still, the butterflies remain, the longer light and warming power of the sun, the presence of the feathered spirits of summer, too.
In a season of flames, we welcome the gift of safe and sheltering warmth.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
