I know people who hate this season. They don’t see the joy in the fire that lights the landscape, only a looming and barren melancholy in the fading of the green. Neither of us will ever understand it except at the intellectual level; in the spirit, this is our season, one filled with contentment and excitement simultaneously, a time of pure joy.
We also recognize that the former view is fundamentally a false one, especially here. This is, after all, a land of evergreen and evergreens: We live at the feet of an entire range of mountains whose slopes are blanketed year-round with pine and cedar, spruce and fir. Even at our own lower elevation, seventy-five hundred feet, our own land is dotted with piñon and juniper and dwarf blue spruce, with two full-sized, impossibly tall blue spruces standing guard.
And as summer disappears behind us, winter looming through the low-angled light of fall, the evergreens here are as rich as they have ever been, heavy with cones, needles long and lush and dark. They are, after all, coming into their own this season, too, and in this place, for them and for their deciduous cousins soon to slumber, the colder seasons are a space for growth.
Such reflections on a day, that, like yesterday, may yet see eighty-five even as the lows plunge near the freezing mark, put me in mind of today’s featured throwback work. I don’t often use this space to highlight entries from many of Wings’s larger signature series (larger and smaller both, in this case, as this diminutive work is one entry among what is now probably hundreds of unique versions of its kind). But I came across this image last night, and it seemed perfect for the themes of this week.
I no longer recall when he created this one. It would have been prior to 2014, and likely after 2008.. My best guess is between 2010 and 2012. It was not, if I remember correctly, a commission, as so many in his Warrior Woman series are; this one, I believe, he created simply for regular inventory, and the identity its eventual wearer is now lost to memory and time. This one, however, was a bit different in its execution in one respect: It’s never been unusual for him to create the heart as an overlay, but this one was unique. We’ll get to that in a moment. First, a little history, from way back in 2014:
Wings has always said that woman are much stronger, much tougher warriors than men are. From a traditional man from a culture that is openly patriarchal in structure, that may seem a shocking admission to outsiders. In reality, it’s simply a recognition of what is — and a lesson to the outside world that while traditional cultures may define gender roles (and other aspects of life) differently from the way the dominant culture does, that does not somehow invalidate them or lessen their inherent value.
Wings addressed this disconnect head-on in the interpretive text that accompanied one grouping of silverwork pieces in his recent one-man show:
It is easy to forget that a wall, a home, a structure, a society endures only through the strength of the cornerstone that serves as its foundation. So it is with our people: The public face is male, but the underlying strength and support, the cornerstones, are the women.
For Wings, this has always been a given: that women are the real strength of the people. It’s one reason that his art has always been oriented, in part, toward imagery and signifiers that are linked with women and women’s identity. But a decade and a half ago, that orientation took a much more personal turn. The result was the Warrior Woman, a pin that would become one of his signature series . . . perhaps the signature series, the one closest to his heart. In his own words:
I created the first in my signature series of pins, the Warrior Woman, as a gift for my mother fifteen years ago, to honor her courage, strength, and heart in her battle with diabetes. She is now with Spirit, and in her memory I continue to create others, each unique, and each to honor the strength and bravery of women.
Since that time, he has created hundreds, at a minimum. They’re worn by women all over the country, and on a few other continents. Each is unique, personal to its wearer; I have a collection of photos of perhaps 100 different Warrior Woman pins just from the last three or four years alone. But a few elements remain constant: the crescent moon in her left hand; the tiny cabochon in her right; the serpent over her shoulder.
And her huge heart.
Sometimes the heart is stamped directly onto the pin. Sometimes it’s a separate piece of silver, an overlay onto the surface. Sometimes, as with the one shown above, it’s a gemstone cut and cabbed into a heart, affixed with jeweler’s adhesive.
It’s his most popular series, and each person finds something different in it.
The Warrior Woman, by virtue of its being a series, does have an informal template of sorts, a guiding outline shape and constituent elements that are all a part of Wings’s design. He could probably draw them in his sleep by now. And still, he cuts each one meticulously freehand, spiraling the tiny jeweler’s saw through the crescent of the moon, wending it around head and open fingers of her right hand, forming the tiny heart that defines her legs and the hem of her dress. Before the saw-work, though, comes the stampwork, and it, too, is meticulous and freehand.
No two Warrior Woman pieces, whether pin or pendant, are ever identical. He believes strongly that each must be unique to the wearer for whom Spirit ultimately intends it. Because they are hand-wrought, of course, there is always natural variation, but the ultimate composition, the sum of stampwork and stone and other details, always varies, too.
In this instance, he chose a pattern that speaks of spaces both safe and sacred, of shelter and sustenance for body and spirit alike. The front of her dress is chased with matched, conjoined thunderhead motifs — a stair-stepped image of considerable and varied symbolic utility. With the narrow “step” pointed downward, it serves as a thunderhead, that stormcloud of summer here that plays such a role in keeping the land alive. Turned the other way up, with the narrow end at the top, it becomes a very old pattern common to Pueblo pottery, one known for perhaps obvious reasons as “kiva steps.” And conjoined, wither vertically or horizontally, the spokes and corners extend to the cardinal and ordinal points, evoking the imagery of the winds and the sacred directions, and of sacred space, too. This last iteration was the one he chose for this particular Warrior Woman’s traditional dress, turning the symbols horizontally to meet at the center. He used only a couple of stamps to form her face and hair (a single dot for the eye; a badger’s or bear’s paw for her bun), and then chose a heart for the crescent moon on her left hand.
For any given symbol, Wings generally has a number of stamps that differ slightly in form and shape. It’s true of the heart motif as much as any other; while he does have a stamp that produces an ordinary, perfectly symmetrical heart, he also has the stylized one shown here, in which the heart’s tail points slightly to the left, making it appear to dance. He stamped five of these in succession around the crescent moon, then cut the entire piece freehand. He then chose a smaller piece of lightweight silver, and cut it, freehand, into a similarly stylized heart shape: larger, uniform at the top, the tail swishing gracefully to the left of the observer’s vision. He added a couple of shallow stamps side by side beneath its upper arcs, gave the whole small piece a lightly hammered look, then soldered it into place over what would be natural location of the Warrior Woman’s heart. This, unusually for these pieces, tied her own specifically to those adance upon the moon in her left hand, a direct linking of feminine power, of love, of nurturing and growth — of, as the name of the piece would make clear, the power and force of “Fertility.”
Next, he soldered a small round bezel into place in the piece’s right hand. This would eventually hold the stone, which, at this point, he was unlikely to have chosen yet. He would then have flipped the piece over on his workbench to add his hallmark and solder the pin assembly into place. Then, he needed one more symbol.
The Warrior Woman, as Wings conceives her, invariably carries a serpent over her right shoulder. For some Indigenous peoples, including some in this broader region, snakes are taboo, but here, they tend to be signs of prosperity and abundance — an association, no doubt, born of their connection to the Water Serpent that is part of so many origin stories and traditions in this part of our world, where water is much more than life. He uses a slender strand of molded sterling silver wire to create the snake, sometimes pattern wire, sometimes triangle wire, sometimes half-round. This one was narrow half-round, and he created the look of pattern wire by meticulously stamping a vertically oriented motif down its entire surface length, a symbol that he often uses to denote acts of flowering, of the flight of a Water Bird. Once the tiny stampwork design was complete, he wrapped it gently around her right arm and soldered it carefully into place, then bent it slightly outward at a graceful angle and soldered the end near her right foot. He then oxidized all of the joins and the stampwork, and buffed it to a medium polish.
Buffing done, it was time to set the stone. As I said, I don’t think he settled on a stone for it until this point. Wings typically creates three or four Warrior Woman pieces at a time, and so he may set out a collection of cabochons, but which one will ultimately be paired with which piece usually remains an open question right up until the moment he sets them. And so it seems significant that he chose jade for this one, a classic stone and color associated with feminine fertility. I might have expected him more normally to choose something in the reds or golds — coral, garnet, rose quartz, amber — to accompany the hearts on the crescent moon. But the dusky green suited her perfectly.
It suits her, and that ultimate Warrior Woman, Mother Earth, perfectly now, too. Her greens here are no long emerald; some have paled and begun to fade, even as those of the evergreens have deepened to teal and blue. Both shades, and both processes, are essential to life here, one bespeaking rest for the cold season before birthing itself again, the other just coming into full flower now. Both provide a space for growth, and both keep our world alive.
It’s fitting that a woman, a warrior, should embody them.
~ 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.
