Not a cloud in the sky nor a drop of rain in the forecast, but today the haze has returned. It’s not humidity — the air is bone dry and hard enough to cut the skin — but the encroaching pall of summer’s greatest threat in this place: wildfire.
In theory, there’s a decent chance of rain . . . beginning a week from Saturday. But in nine days, a lot can burn.
Meanwhile, our highs exceed ninety daily, the winds move in great hot walls through the heat-bleached air, picking up giant handfuls of dust to twist and send spinning across the land in a drought-riddled death spiral.
We are having to adjust, to adapt, to evolve on the fly now, a daily process of recalibrating and not so much relearning as learning a new how to survive in this world so badly altered. It means adjusting our ways of understanding our world now, of finding new patterns and forging new relationships with the elemental forces that keep that world spinning on its axis. It means figuring out how to live in a world where water is worse than scarce, and of reconfiguring the ways humanity plays with fire.
In some ways, it’s less a question of anything new than it is one of going back to our Indigenous roots: reconnecting with ways simultaneously more fundamental and less convenient, with less artificial (and illusive) control over our environment. It means stewarding the land rather than exploiting it: conserving water, planting on different schedules, using controlled burns to preserve habitat and prevent larger wildfire outbreaks. It means engaging with Mother Earth as she is now, after all the damage that colonialism has inflicted, and with what it truly means to live in this high-altitude country, all desert fire and heavy weather.
It put me in mind of today’s featured throwback work, one consonant with this week’s visual and materials themes of copper coils, yet in a wholly different way. It’s a throwback only to the end of last year, at the holiday season, one of a groups of nine separate coil bracelets that was a special commission by a dear friend. She wanted six coils of regular length, which, when off the wrist, will wrap at least four full times, and three extended-length ones that would feature six wraps. This was the third of the three in the latter category.
When Wings created each of the nine individual pieces, it was important to him that their colors and textures and symbolic motifs be drawn from our natural world here. This one, called, appropriately enough, Desert Fire, he created to embody the look and feel of summer here, the basaltic rock and fiery copper of a hot earth mixed with blood-red suns and an equally hot blue sky.
The coils all assume the same general form, made possible by the memory wire on which the beads are strung. Memory wire is stainless steel, specially treated to create its coiled form and to retain its spring and snap, so that it expands and contracts to fit nearly any wrist. It’s much like the old Slinky toy, only a far finer strand of metal, one plated with silver for color and shine.
Whenever Wings creates a coil bracelet, he uses the beads to tell a story: with color, with texture, with type of stone or other material and with shape and spirit. This one was long on texture, and manifest in all the colors of a hot high-desert summer season, a time when fire is not confined to flames, but visible in the shimmering mica-unfused red earth of this place.
This coil began, first, with large wood focal beads at the center: genuine African ebony, hand-carved and -polished by Indigenous African artisans to a silken sheen. At the very middle sat the largest oval, a graduated length of smaller ones extending from each side. The center was flanked by two fiery orbs of highly polished sardonyx, like the blood-red suns of a wildfire sky. From these hot shades the coil moved rapidly to a balancing cool: smaller ebony alternating with deep gray Labradorite rounds refracting shades of cobalt and ice simultaneously.
From these central beads, the coil unfurled in either direction in a graduated series of smaller beads, highly textured and alternating hot and cool motifs throughout: fiery amber arrayed against smooth jet; smaller sardonyx rounds with a matte marbled finish; more ovaled barrel beads of rich basaltic lava rock, like that found in places along the Great River here and in The Malpaís to the west, alternating with very, very old hand-made copper barrel beads form Wings’s private collection; faceted mookaite in rich reds and golds sharing space with round matte onyx, smooth and cool; old glowing brass rounds dancing with small Madagascar Labradorite rounds refracting flashes of impossible blues, smaller frosty kyanite, and still smaller shimmering apatite in the shades of the summer sky.
In effect, there were really only three sets of colors involved in the creation of this piece: blacks and fire and shades of blue, a spiral of earth and flame and sky.
This one was, if memory serves, the final coil in this nine-piece commission (in terms of order or creation, I mean; there are one or two not yet featured in this space that we will get to later). The coils represent an area of his work in which he chooses to bring me directly into the creative process: partly because I essentially have his entire materials inventory, including beads, committed to memory at any given time; mostly because I have the ability, whether blessing or curse, to see so-called “true color” and distinguish subtly-different shades accordingly. And this wound up being one of my favorites, both among the nine separate pieces in this commission and among the entire body of coils he’s created over the years — for the opposing colors and textures, and especially for the use of those ancient copper barrel beads, each one hand-made and wildly irregular, but no less perfect for that.
On this day, in the heart of what should be our rainy season that is instead burning up in the deathgrip of drought, it reminds me, too, to engage with our world, new and impossibly old at once, as it is: to learn to thrive in this spiral of earth and flame and sky.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
