More haze, more heat, more rainless wind: All the land is held fast in the drought’s grip now. The landscape looks more like late September than mid-August, but the temperature is all the furnace fire of June. The earth is burning up before our eyes, all the old patterns and cycles reduced to ash now.
And yet . . . .
And yet, some spirits still thrive. The bluebirds have arrived, more or less on schedule, to bring the shades of the sky close. The wild sunflowers are finally mostly in full bloom, albeit their banks far more modest than in some years. And despite the perils of pandemic and depredations of drought, the spirits that animate our small world here still strive. A true rainy season would be better, yes, but what survives is strength and courage and not a little stubbornness, an example of desert dreams fulfilled despite the best efforts of less benign forces now.
Such thoughts put me in mind of a very special work from earlier this year: a throwback to February for its conceptual stages, and only to early May for its completion. It was a commission from a very dear friend, an addition to her expanding collection of barrettes by Wings, each of which is built around a focal gemstone of a different color. She wanted to add a work in shades of red to her collection, and she had seen photos of some of the extraordinary cabochons in Wings’s inventory of a gorgeous material known as Apache sage rhyolite. It’s found principally in parts of Arizona and the Sonora District of what is now known as Mexico, just over the line that marks the artificial border between it and this country we call the U.S. now.
Wings actually had somewhere between six and eight cabochons of a size suitable for a large barrette (like me, she has long, thick hair, and a smaller barrette won’t work), and so I took photos of them and sent them to her to choose. I don’t think it was ever really a question; while they were all strikingly beautiful, each uniquely patterned in the stone’s trademark mix of dusky reds, with dendritic blooms atop finely banded backgrounds, this one was special. The “bloom” matrix on the surface of the stone really does resemble a stand of desert sage (or perhaps chamisa or mesquite), and it looked for all the world like a the local landscape at sunset, just after a summer storm.
Our friend also wanted a couple of stones on either side of it, to set off the center cab and fill the space proportionally, and so I sent her some photos of her chosen focal cabochon flanked by two different combinations, moonstone and garnet, and moonstone and carnelian. Both picked up the reds in the rhyolite, but the garnet held a deeper, darker glow, and that was the combination that she ultimately chose.
And then Wings set to work.
The first task was choosing the silver. Sheet silver comes in a wide selection of gauges, a term that covers both thickness and weight. The higher the number, the lighter the gauge; the lower the number, the heavier and thicker the silver. What this means is that higher-gauge silver is thin and flexible, while lower-gauge silver is harder to bend. For a barrette, the wearer wants it to be flexible enough to form the proper arc behind the clip, and light enough not to weight down one’s hair or turn over . . . but at the same time, sturdy enough not to bend too easily or to break beneath the weight of the stones.
If memory serves, Wings chose fourteen-gauge silver for this one, which is a bit on the heavy side for most barrettes. But knowing that it would need to hold five cabochons, one of them large, and would also need to hold a great deal of long, heavy hair, it proved to be the perfect choice.
With designs like this, he spends quite a bit of time going back and forth between silver and stone in the early stages, laying them out across the surface as they will ultimately appear to ensure that size and spacing are correct. Because a barrette like this needs a gently arcing shape, he also knew that he would have to elevate the focal stone a bit, to prevent movement cracking the solder and the resultant fracture from losing the bezel or the stone. So he placed the stones where they were intended to go, then cut the long, rectangular shape freehand and filed it smooth. Next, he scored a simple straight line just inside the edges on all sides, also freehand; this formed a slender, elegant border all the way around it.
Then it was time to design the stampwork. Our friend had specified a general design similar to one of Wings’s earlier barrettes that she already owned — not the particular stamp, necessarily, but rather, the fact of a repeating motif all the way around it. For this, Wings chose a single stamp, one that he uses to good effect for multiple symbolic purposes: a triangular shape lined vertically in a radiant pattern, above the small arcs that vaguely resemble clouds. By itself, he uses it various to represent sunrise, mountain, or tipi/lodge motifs; conjoined, the form an Eye of Spirit. Here, he kept them solitary, the open base placed around the scored inner border and the tip pointing inwards, repeated all the way around the inside border of the barrette. Aside from synthesizing powerful symbols of illumination and protection, it also drew the eye directly to the barrette’s center, where the stones would be arrayed. Then he gently shaped the barrette into the proper arc, and soldered the French clip assembly onto the back.
As I noted above, the size of the rhyolite cabochon meant that he would have to set it above the barrette’s surface, rather than directly on it. And so he created a scalloped bezel, placed against an oval backing extended just fractionally beyond the bezel’s own edges so that he could edge it with twisted silver. Once the pieces were soldered into place and he had confirmed the fit of the cabochon, he took a slender piece of sterling silver tubing and cut a length a tiny fraction of an inch long. After filing its ends smooth, he soldered one end into the center of the bezel’s backing, then soldered the other directly onto the very center of the barrette’s surface, ensuring that the bezel was turned so that oval was arrayed horizontally. Once secure, he fashioned four saw-toothed bezels, one small horizontal oval on either side of the center setting, and one smaller round one at either end. Then he oxidized the joins and all of the scorework and stampwork, and buffed it to a rich, velvety glow.
And when I say “glow,” I mean glow: It was an incredibly warm, rich finish even before the setting of the stones, but once each cabochon was set securely, the mix of radiant lunar white and rich wine red and the brick shades of that stormy desert landscape less contrasted with the silver than complemented it directly, as though all pieces conspired to create some sort of alchemical magic and medicine.
There’s not much that’s magic about the need for rain, but the water is most definitely medicine. But like the landscape in this work’s focal stone, so, too, is this land, stronger than we know and better able to survive than outside forces could ever comprehend. And this, too, is medicine: desert dreams fulfilled, whether because or in spite of weather and climate.
There are many come to fruition now, and we are grateful for each one.
~ 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.
