However high-flown our human aspirations, life will inevitably bring us back down to earth.
Our peoples are fortunate, in that we are the earth: bound inextricably to the land, its blood and bone and DNA and our own braided together in an elemental and ancestral helix.
This is not to say that we do not share aspirations toward higher realms — far from it. Many of our spiritual traditions include the flights of soul and spirit that we call visions and dreams. And, of course, some of our cosmologies tell of the skies as the place where the spirits dwell, as the original home of the first people, or as the place to which the soul returns when it travels beyond reach of this world.
But in our day-to-day lives, we all remain steadfastly earthbound. The dominant culture seems to find this fact a source of enormous frustration, a state of affairs to be fought, however futilely. Indeed, despite all the lip service it grants to the supposed virtues of being practical, sensible, down to earth, it too often regards those who do not seek to transcend that state with open derision.
But the earth is a gift.
In our way, her very existence is proof of the spirits’ love for us. In return, it is our charge to care for her properly, to ensure her health and well-being and thereby ensure that of our grandchildren’s grandchildren. That’s another lesson the outside world has failed to learn — and we are all now paying for that bankruptcy of spirit.
Here, we have always known that whatever our circumstances in other respects, we are always wealthy by one standard: We live in a place of extraordinary beauty and abundance, no matter the weather or season, and we need only to step out of doors to avail ourselves of it.
In Wings’s work, this contrast between the spirits of earth and sky is nowhere more obvious than in one particular gemstone variant. In his silverwork, the stone he has used more than any other is the Skystone — turquoise, but there is one form that is unique in its identity, with a complex, compound beauty. It’s known variously as boulder turquoise or, in some manifestations, ribbon turquoise.
I’ve written about boulder turquoise here before, as a part of our past Turquoise Tuesday series. It’s a phenomenon that occurs where turquoise deposits are small relative to the host rock in which they are found, tiny chips and slices and ribbons of bright blue or green buried in earth-toned boulder. Such deposits are too small, and usually too thin and fragile, to extract in any useful form on their own, but they provide a stunning accent to the host rock in which they occur.
And what’s normally lost in the mining of gemstones is the earthy natural beauty of that host rock. The mining of boulder turquoise (or other “boulder” gems, such as opal) throws that beauty into sharp relief.
About a dozen years ago, Wings acquired a set of three boulder turquoise cabochons from Nevada’s Fox Mine. They were all clearly from the same deposit, and were sold as a set — three unusually large free-form cabs, the two smaller mirror-image triangles in shape, the larger a stylized crescent. They were all warm and vibrant tones of golden brown, webbed with a coppery self-matrix, and shot through here and there with bits of perfect sky blue.
He elected to keep the three together as a set, and turned them into the necklace you see here: a traditional style, one that works with the line and shape and flow of the stones rather than forcing it into an artificial form.
It all began with the bezels.
One of the difficulties of working with free-form cabochons is that the bezels must be hand-made. It’s a skill better developed by some artisans than others; it requires great patience, a steady hand, a good eye, and a willingness to put in the work needed to get it just right. With a work such as this, the bezels for the two smaller stones, while labor-intensive enough on their own, would have been fairly straightforward: two more or less matched triangles, just a shade off isosceles, with all points slightly rounded.
The larger cab presented greater challenges, by way of the curvatures of the crescent. The very thin sheet silver cut into strips that is used as bezel wire is flexible, but flexibility is relative. It’s a fairly simple matter to curve it around the outer, large part of the crescent and have it hold the proper shape; less so to accommodate the sharper depression that flows into the sharpened corner at the upper left of the stone shown here. It has to be formed exactly to size and soldered accurately to ensure that it will hold the stone securely . . . and embrace the stone’s edge without even tiny gaps.
Once the bezels were made, Wings turned his attention to how they would be brought together. He kept it as simple and straightforward as possible in design, but the execution required far more work. First, he soldered a sterling silver jump ring to either point at the top of the large stone; he added a pair of jump rungs to each of the triangles, one at the center of the bottom plane and one at the top point of each. He connected the base of each triangle to its respective point of the crescent with a small but sturdy hand-made silver loop. This formed the entirety of the gemstone “pendant” portion of the necklace.
At this point, he could simply have strung it on ordinary snake or link chain and called it finished.
Instead, he took a final labor-intensive step, creating his own chain entirely by hand.
Hand-made chain links were once the norm for Native silverwork. In recent decades, however, it’s become far more cost-effective for most smiths to use commercial chain, and there’s certainly no shame in it; Wings uses it when he considers it appropriate to a specific piece. Creating links entirely by hand, however, is rapidly becoming an art practiced by only a relative handful of traditional silversmiths, and Wings is one of them.
It’s a process that is deceptively simple: Hand-cut lengths of thin sheet silver into short slender strips, stamp them, if appropriate, bevel their edges smooth and buff their surfaces, and then gently bend them into the oval link shape you see here and loop them together. Once a link is looped through the next, it must be soldered together before the next one is added. It’s a process very like that most of learned in kindergarten at Christmastime, when our teachers taught us to create paper chains as “tree garlands” out of loops of construction paper strung and glued together.
For this one, however, Wings took the creative process a step further. Rather than looping the links through each other, he fashioned a series of smaller connecting links — ones identical to the two that linked the jump rings on the stones below — and used these tiny hand-made loops to connect each larger link in the chain.
It’s a long and laborious process, and so it’s relatively rare that a silversmith utilizing this technique will create a long necklace; doing so immediately elevates the price out of the range of most buyers. But in this instance, the compound design of the pendant stones would not have worked with a long chain, anyway: They needed a structure that would allow them to rest just below the wearer’s collarbone. He finished it off with a full length, held open from end to end, of roughly seventeen inches or so.
It was a truly striking work, one that took two or three years to find its home. A woman walked into the gallery one day and was immediately taken with its look. She asked me what the stone was called, and I told her that it was boulder Fox turquoise, explaining about the different types of turquoise and how it manifests. She tried it on, and decided that it had been waiting for her.
She walked out with a beautiful collection of host rock, warm and polished and eminently down to earth, lit with the bright blue spirits of the sky.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2017; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
