Dawn broke this day amid a haze of pollen and a pall of smoke, the latter having drifted inward from the deadly conflagration twelve hundred miles away. The wind’s well-honed autumnal edge has driven a little of it eastward, but the dimming grayness remains, lending a wan and weak-looking aspect to the light. Rain is unlikely today, but so, it seems, is the full force of the sun.
Now, at midday, clouds and haze have merged into a pale gray miasma. The day feels bleak and slightly eerie, as though burdened by a sense of foreboding that it cannot shake.
It’s no surprise, given the state of the world: a rising tide of fascism, unchecked pandemic spiking again, the catastrophic effects of climate change as evidenced by the smoke itself, all of them direct and entirely predictable results of colonialism’s evils. but even today’s haunted and haunting aspect cannot entirely obscure all the layers of the light.
This week’s featured #ThrowbackThursday work, one that dates back to 2007 or 2008, captures these layers and others, too: earth and sky, air and water, sun and light, and a flowering of all the beauty and medicine they conspire to create. It was one entry in Wings’s intermittent, occasional series of layered-bezel works, mostly necklaces but a few rings and other items over the years, as well. This was a piece with an Art Deco sensibility to it, a graceful geometry of angles and curves layered in silver and stone.
As always, it began with the silver, but in this case, with the stones, as well. The very form and shape of the pendant follows the stones, which necessitated their choosing before the work of smithing could begin. And for this piece, Wings selected an unusual combination, contrasting and yet still coordinating in size and shape, shade and spirit.
At the top was a highly-domed rectangular cabochon from his personal collection, consisting of a wide array of nuggets and slabs and cabochons and more, some inherited, some acquired through trade, some bought outright, all of them mostly long past any possibility of definitive provenance if they were unlabeled at the point of acquisition. This one was eld out to him as turquoise — yellow turquoise, and while some colonial dealers and “experts” will tell you there’s no such thing, it’s actually not as impossible as it sounds.
First, a little background, from an early entry on this site, in our Turquoise Tuesday series — and referring explicitly to turquoise from two Nevada mine sources, Carico Lake and Damele, that sometimes manifest in shades of yellow:
Like Carico Lake, Damele turquoise contains a great deal of limonite in the matrix, which, along with zinc, is part of what gives it its lime-green to yellowish cast. Some of it is classified as faustite, which, again, is part of the turquoise “family” of stones, so to speak, but is not precisely the same thing. Some gemologists insist that any appearance of lime green or apple green stone is by definition faustite rather than straight turquoise; others believe it’s more complex, and that some electric green turquoise is indeed fully turquoise rather than faustite — and that it is possible for the two minerals to coappear in the same stone. We subscribe to the “complexity” theory.
There are also types of stone sold as “African turquoise” or from other lands that are variations on yellow. Those same dealers and “experts” will insist it’s all jasper, but it’s clearly not. That said? Turquoise is a mix of blues and greens, and its color and matrix hues change based on the minerals and substances that co-occur in a given deposit. Faustite adds shades of yellow, chartreuse, and lime green; certain types of host rock include it with various shades of brown and gray; chert adds gray and black; copper, gold-red; pyrite, silvery shimmer. There is some turquoise so pale that it’s nearly white; other forms that look emerald-green; and still others with inclusions of brick red or inky purple. Within all those many permutations, is it possible that some stone comes out looking majority olive-gold, like the cabochon above? Of course. And this specimen does have the classic crackling appearance of spiderwebbed matrix, which is a hallmark of many varieties of turquoise.
But . . . the texture isn’t quite right. It’s not jasper-like, either; it’s richer, rougher, more matte. That could be just the old-style polish of lapidary work done long ago. But here’s what I suspect: a mix of turquoise and/or variscite, included with perhaps some faustite, perhaps some serpentine, and a bit of chert and copper for the matrix. Blended together by geologic forces over time on an epochal scale, what resulted was an mix of materials melded together, olive-gold serpentine webbed with copper and some pale icy blue-white variscite, perhaps a little icy-blue turquoise underneath, both marbled with chert . . . and with just the faintest smidgen of turquoise present, nonetheless sold as such by a non-Native dealer decades ago.
The fact of the matter is that, aesthetically, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a beautifully complex stone, and the very mystery surrounding its provenance only adds to that beauty, and to the complexity too. But by itself, taken in a vacuum? It looks like an aerial view of a sunlit earth, golden land mapped and marbled by rock and river and the occasional intervening cloud, as though earth and sun have become one. Leading, as it did, to the smaller oval of flawless blue turquoise below it? It evoked the feel of sun above sky and flowering earth . . . and of the earth pooling the water that allows for that flowering.
As I said, the oval cabochon, set on the horizontal, was a flawless turquoise blue. There was no matrix in it anywhere, only the faintest hint of marbling of blues on its domed center. These days, that’s a classic look for Sleeping Beauty turquoise, out of Arizona, but this stone was older. Again, you could tell by the lapidary work, which left it well-polished, but not at all glossy. It both looked and felt like a perfect robin’s egg in miniature.
And the two textured cabochons made a wonderful foil for Wings’s third choice of cabochon: a tiny round faceted rose quartz stone, brilliantly pink, radiating color like the petals of a summer wildflower. It was also just as perfectly proportional: wide rectangle at the top, narrower oval in the middle, tiny round specimen at the base. Placed together they formed a motif a bit like the traditional thunderhead symbol, an obverse pyramid with rounded, graceful edges.
And so Wings designed the silver around them.
It would require, in fact, three layers of silver, all cut freehand: the largest lower layer; the middle layer, sized a few millimeters narrower and overlaid atop the lower one; and then the bezels built around each of the stones atop the middle overlay. The result, with the stones, would be four discrete layers, melded together into one pendant.
The bail was a simple loop of sterling silver, cut and shaped by hand and soldered carefully into place. Once the silverwork layers were combined and the bail added, Wings oxidized all the joins thoroughly, then buffed the entire piece to a rich aged Florentine finish. All the remained was to set the stones . . . and to decide on a strand from which to hang it.
Among this series of necklaces, he used a wide variety of materials: sometimes plain sterling silver chain; sometimes heishi; sometimes other gemstone beads. Fo this one, he chose a strand of heishi-cut disc beads of rich blue turquoise webbed with inky black, the turquoise rondels separated by tiny round bits of olivella-shell heishi. The teal blues in the beads picked up the deep blue of the center stone in the pendant, set off the golden glow of the upper cabochon, and provided a cool, soothing contrast with the rose quartz at the bottom: golds and blues and pinks in a glowing silver embrace, refracting their colors in all the layers of the light.
On a day like this, when the smoke veils the sun and the wind whispers of winter, it’s a beautiful reminder that those layers remain.
~ Aji
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