We have spent the week thus far amidst feathers and smoke, spirit and light. For us, this is an everyday experience, something so integral to our world as to be immanent. But for all its seeming ordinariness, it is also something profound, and profoundly sacred.
This is, perhaps, the eternal dynamic of Wings’s work: that that which is so mundane as to be a part of his daily existence is also something elevated by its connection to the spirits. It’s why the sacred so deeply informs his art — indeed, is inseparable from it. And it’s what renders his representations of the sacred into tributes, tokens of honor and affirmations of respect, rather than the sacrilege of cheap commodification.
Given the subject matter, today seemed an opportune time to return to a work from a full decade ago, one in a motif that resonates deeply with his own lifelong tradition and praxis. It’s a pair of earrings in the form of Water Birds (sometimes called Peyote Birds), a symbol and signifier in the Native American Church. It’s a spiritual practice with many names, including The Red Road and The Tipi Way. Wings’s father was a Road Man, as was his uncle Paul, and they instilled in him a deep and abiding respect for its process and path.
As a result, Wings’s art has always been informed by and infused with the imagery of his traditions. The Water Bird has appeared in Wings’s body of work for decades, sometimes assuming differing form and shape, but always true to its spirit. Ten years ago, he made this pair, a bit of a departure from his more spare and highly stylized versions, and they were powerful indeed.
The basic image of the Water Bird is fairly consistent across the wide geographic span of peoples and cultures who have incorporated it into their traditions: head straight up, ending in the pointed beak, rather than turned to one side as is more common with that other avian symbol, the Thunderbird; wings arched and outstretched in upward flight; tail extended straight downward from the body and flared at the end. But within those parameters, the Water Bird can assume many forms, and the details may be quite different. With the design of this particular pair of earrings, Wings himself engaged in a throwback of his own, to a time from perhaps, say, thirty or forty years ago extending backward to the turn of the last century, when this particular shape, all full-bodied elegant arcs and curves, was popular. These were an homage not only to his own tradition, but to some of the oldest styles of imagery thereof.
He began, as always, with lightweight sheet silver, the outlines cut freehand with a tiny jeweler’s saw. He then set to work drawing out the details: a small and subtle thunderhead stamp at the base of the bird’s slender neck, making the feathered joint clear; sunrise symbols of varying sizes to form the body and articulate the layers of feathers on the wings and the tips of the tailfeathers; hand-scored lines to throw the individual tailfeathers into sharp relief. That alone would have made for a beautifully inspirited pair of earrings.
But compared to the rest, the body of each bird contained an unusually blank space. And so he chose two tiny round cabochons of old coral, blood red, and set them in equally tiny saw-toothed bezels soldered to the center of each bird like a round red heart.
Taken together, the completed earrings summoned deeply symbolic imagery: all of the spiritual representation attendant upon the Water Bird itself, coupled with the motifs of feathers and prayer, all bound together in the color of the rising and setting sun, of our very identity, of our blood. Of all of the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Water Birds among his decades-long body of work, these were some of the most powerful.
I thought of them again this morning at my own dawn prayers, and of all that they represent. Artistically and historically, they may symbolize a throwback, but they remain very much a part of our present . . . and our future. It’s difficult to ask much more of art than that.
~ Aji
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