We spoke yesterday of the birds who are messengers of the light: the great raptors who view the world from the vantage point of the whole, emissaries of Spirit whose wings feather visions and dreams over the earth in the form of the ancient dust of the sun and stars.
On this Throwback Thursday, we go back in time a mere four years or so, to one of Wings’s pieces that was, quite literally, built around the stone at its center. I should know; at his urging, I designed it.
It was another stone like the one in the piece featured at the top of this post, and from the same source: friends in New England who do their own cutting and cabbing of stones local to them, stones they find themselves. The minerals are of a wholly different sort than the ones commonly found in this place, and certainly very different from what characterizes most Southwestern Native jewelry. The people who create these cabochons are masters at following the line of the stone itself, at respecting its identity and integrity, and the result is something beautifully unique.
Wings had had this stone on his workbench for some time, but could not decide what he wanted to do with it. Its asymmetrical shape was not conducive to much of what are widely regarded as the traditional shapes of Indian jewelry: circles, ovals, teardrops, the occasional rectangle that settle themselves easily into bold pendants and cuffs and belt buckles. But he knew that he wanted to use it in something that would highlight the stone’s incredible natural qualities.
The stone is aventurine, and it’s something we’ll cover in a future edition of our Tuesday Jewels and Gems series. Specifically, it’s white aventurine, but the stone also manifests in shades of gold and green and blue. The green is perhaps the most common shade, followed by the golden yellow. Less common are the blues and whites, but all are softly, subtly, delicately beautiful.
What makes aventurine so special is the way it captures and refracts the light. It’s an opaque stone, but it is shot throughout with pure shimmer: glints and flecks of metallic shine, a result of the inclusions in the stone itself. They are not, however, “matrix” in the usual way we conceive of it. Aventurine is a form of quartz, with a granular crystal structure that renders it opaque rather than clear. The inclusions that appear in it are unusual, appearing in neither rutile form nor in the patching and webbing common to other minerals like turquoise. Instead, the inclusions are very property that connects the stone in spirit to this place: Mica. The same mica that animates the red clay indigenous to this land, the very mineral that is the hallmark of the pottery for which Taos Pueblo’s potters are famed worldwide.
It’s like capturing a bit of the light itself in the stone, the ancient dust and dreams of the sun and the moon and the stars, bonded together by time and heat and pressure to create a bit of skydust that you can hold in your hand. With the white form of aventurine, like the one featured in this piece, the mica gives the host stone a glittery effect marked here and there by barely-perceptible swirls of gold.
One day, Wings handed the stone to me with instructions to see what I could do with it in terms of comprehending what its final form was meant to be. As I turned it over in my hands, I saw a bird, one of the great raptors, leaning forward on its perch at a watchful angle. I knew, though, that the setting was meant to summon the spirit of the stone, not overshadow it, and so I sketched out a minimalist shape that would bring the stone — and with it, Hawk’s own body and spirit — front and center.
What emerged were the barest outlines of Hawk: flat crown, hooked beak, slightly articulated wing feathers, flared tail. Wings took the sketch, drew it onto a sheet of sterling silver, and gently excised the outline with a tiny jeweler’s saw. You can just see the bail peeking out top the bird’s head; he went to great lengths to balance it just so, ensuring that the hawk would lie against the collarbone at the proper angle, despite the off-center weight from the angle of its body.
But perhaps the most significant part of the design is what you cannot see. My sketch included an angled trapezoidal shape in the center, one that tracked the shape and lean of the cabochon itself, writ slightly smaller. Wings cut that portion out of the setting entirely, exposing the stone’s shimmering reverse, so that it might lie directly against the wearer’s skin. He then hung the pendant from a heavy silver rope chain, “diamond-cut” to refract the light, yet aged slightly to occupy a space on the spectrum between the shining silver of the setting and the golden ivory of the stone.
I called it WhiteHawk, and it now flies with a friend who lives in my own home state. At a time when she was undergoing an acute situation with her health, a group of friends crowd-funded its purchase for her, to bring her luck. But before it went to live with her, it spent some time in the gallery, in a prominent place on one of the jewelry forms on the table where the more expensive items were placed.
One day, when Wings himself was staffing the gallery, a couple came in to browse. He told me that this work caught their eye, and they said to him, as tourists often do, “Tell me about this piece.” He proceeded to explain, and they then asked what its name was. Caught off-guard, Wings could not remember whether I’d named it or not, so he gave them the name by which he had always thought of the piece.
Spirit Bird Dream.
In retrospect, I think it’s a far more accurate rendering of Hawk’s identity.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
