Our high reached fifty-four yesterday — far too warm for the waning weeks of winter here. What only days ago was nearly two feet of snow had been reduced in most places by last night to only two inches. Even that will be largely gone by this day’s end, leaving only piles of shoveled snow and shadowed drifts scattered here and there.
Meanwhile, the aspens are budding out too early, too — glossy red-brown catkins already opening to display the cotton beneath. From a distance, the branches seem studded with red jewels, beaded in crimson and copper in the angled light.
And in the places where the thaw has already sent the water into the bare earth, new green already rises, reaching toward the sun. In our world, spring is not merely imminent, it’s already here — arrived with early gifts of cascading green beneath a threshold sky.
It’s a phenomenon that puts me in mind of today’s featured throwback, this one a pair of earrings from some eight or ten years ago, manifest in the powers of the sky and the jade of the late-winter waters and new-spring growth. It’s a design that Wings has used regularly, if intermittently, over the years, each time with a different gemstone (or, on at least one or two occasions, a highly stylized version with no stone at all). It’s an old motif given new and expressive life, one that manages to be simultaneously an homage to the sacred directions and an invocation of the power and wisdom of the Eye of Spirit.
So in this case, perhaps obviously, the design begins with the silver.
The Eye of Spirit is typically depicted as diamond-like geometric shape: turned sideways, it’s easy to see the rough outlines of the form of a human eye in it. In Indigenous cultures, it tends to represent guidance, wisdom — the great presiding powers of those who inhabit the spirit world, particularly those understood as the Creator of all that is. Wings frequently infuses his work with its imagery in the form of stamped symbols, like those that appear at the top and bottom of each earring in today’s featured work. But sometimes, he gives the entire work the Eye’s form and shape.
And sometimes, he combines it with another motif of great symbolic significance, that of the Sacred Directions, to evoke the form and feel of and the wisdom inherent in all-encompassing Indigenous power.
At any season, it’s a force — forces, plural — to be reckoned with. At this threshold season between winter and spring, when the only sure thing in our world is that nothing is sure, not the blue of the sky or the green of the earth, not the waters or the light? Such imagery is more than talismanic; it’s hope and promise combined.
And so, in this sometimes-series of earrings, Wings weds these motifs into one powerful form, an elongated diamond stylized and stretched to form a dangling fall of pure silver, its sides cut freehand to create a series four layers at top and bottom, each corner extending outward to the ordinal points. The top and bottom points of the diamond were, of course, arrayed to north and south; the east-west axis was traversed by a pair of tiny points extending horizontally from the very center, below the top four “layers” and above the lower four. At the very top, a tiny round loop extended from the point itself, a small open circle emerging organically from each earring. These loops would hold the jump rings used to attach the wires.
Once the outlines were excised from the silver, given full and flared being, Wings took a plain stamp with a chisel-like end and scored twelve deep lines into each earring: three per side on the upper half, three per side on the lower half, each line extending inward from its corresponding “corner” to create the layered appearance of the diamonds.
Once the lines were scribed into the silver, Wings chose a plain, simple diamond-shaped stamp to reinforce the pattern, and stamped it once at each of the open areas at the top and bottom of each earrings. Then, having by now settled on the stones that would become the earrings’ focal point, he fashioned a plain, low-profile round bezel at the very center of each earring. Soldering and stampwork complete, he oxidized the joins between bezel and setting and the scoring and stampwork, then oxidized the earrings to a medium-high polish.
Buffing complete, all that remained were the attaching of the wires and the setting of the stones. For this particular pair, Wings had chosen a pair of round jade cabochons in a vibrant deep green, the color of grass and new leaves, of the medicine of spring. Completed, they formed a cascading green and silver, a medicine of water and growth and light.
As noted above, this style is one of Wings’s intermittent signature series, one irregularly produced, but always with a slightly different focus. Sometimes the stones are a grounding onyx; sometimes the turquoise of the desert sky; sometimes lacking entirely, to create a concentrated light. This pair, though, were the color of the fresh blades of grass now rising here and there above a fast-melting snow — the color of spring, even before winter’s end.
~ 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.
