This morning’s sunrise held more of October than August’s end: all molten copper and fire in the east; Impressionist brush strokes painting the sky a dusty rose in the west. It’s a product of the wispy veils of cloud that drifted in unexpectedly overnight, wrapping the horizon in their gentle embrace.
Now that the sun has cleared the ridgeline, the light of day is all silver.
The clouds remain, though — thin white lines floating, drifting, joining and separating and meeting up again, impossibly fragile and just as impossibly strong. They remind of our own ties to past and future, the threads that braid our lives into the larger sacred hoop of our ancestors, and of generations yet to come in a world we shall never see but that we must ensure for them.
In terms of silverwork, this week is devoted to the the most fundamental, elemental works among Wings’s current inventory: silver, no stones, indeed, bare almost entirely of ornamentation, save for spare and simple millwork. It’s a style in which he works only occasionally in recent years, as the creative vision directs. In years past, he has done much in plain silver, if “plain” is defined as devoid of gemstones, but past collections have usually included significant stampwork. Today’s featured work, from eight or nine years ago, is no exception.
It does, however, reflect the spirit of more recent works insofar as stampwork was not the only smithing involved. Unlike most such cuffs from that period, this one was also hand-milled, a first step before the stamping commenced.
It was also one that spoke of lines and links, of spaces occupied and braids bound together, of cultural connection of generational lines, all wrought in a single heavy arc of shimmering silver light.
This piece began with a six-inch length of heavy-gauge sterling silver triangle wire.
Yes, triangle wire; where the cuff is flat on the top, it was once apexed. The first thing Wings did was to feed the heavy strand through his rolling mill — a very old, and very old-school, piece of equipment that can alter the shape of a heavy piece of metal in fundamental ways. It operates much like an old-fashioned hand-crank washing “machine,” the kind my mother had when I was very small — the sort that is not machine power at all, but simply a tub with a couple of heavy metal plates at the top, with the clothes fed through them via an equally heavy and resistant hand-crank. A rolling mill of this sort is much, much smaller, more upright, but its operation is similar: It’s essentially a collection of adjustable plates and grooves and wheels that can be set to different spaces, thicknesses, and even patterns, and the silver is fed through it entirely by hand by cranking a heavy handle on the side. It’s not easy work, not merely because of the muscle torque required, but also because the smith has to be able to keep the silver on straight path as it makes its way through the mill. It’s very easy for it to slide minutely and become offset, and then the lines will skew in one direction or another.
Such milling (or rolling; the terms are used mostly interchangeably), can be used to create pinched borders or peaks in the center of a stand; to add patterns to plain silver; or to flatten out raised areas, among other options. For this particular work, Wings chose the last: He fed the strand of triangle wire through the plates slowly and meticulously, applying enough weight and pressure to displace the silver that formed the peak of the triangle into a flat mesa-like top. It produced an impression of square wire, which exists, but if you look closely at the photo, you’ll see that only the top appears square; the sides slope gently downward like ordinary triangle wire half-round wire looks similar, except that the base curves ever so slightly inward from the center of the sides). Once the millwork was complete, Wings took a solid jeweler’s hammer and hammered each end flat, then filed the edges smooth and rounded.
Then came the hard part.
It’s not so difficult (for a skilled silversmith) to stamp the sides of triangle wire. The sides themselves provide a nice flat surface, and an experienced jeweler with steady hands can hold the band still enough, and strike the hammer hard enough, to stamp deeply and evenly. Wings is particularly skilled at it. But when triangle wire is milled, it displaces the silver and reforms the entire piece. And so while his purpose in milling this band was to flatten the top, the fact of the matter is that the sides change a bit, too. It’s simple physics; matter displaced will accumulate elsewhere, altering mass and shape. And so while the top became flattened, the sides were no longer perfectly flat; there was the slightest hint of curvature. This meant that the stampwork for the sides would need to be done with special care.
Before getting to that task, however, his design required something else, also a task with a far greater degree of difficulty. He wanted to separate the center stretch of band into an exponent of the sacred number four. In other words, he wanted to create sixteen separate bands arrayed in a repeating pattern down the center. He took a plain chisel-edged stamp and struck the band repeatedly, freehand, completing each separate space individually by striking an even furrow across the top, then repeating it by a connecting furrow down either side. It required a total of fifty-one strikes of the chisel: seventeen on the top, to create the sixteen enclosed bands, and seventeen on each side. When complete, the shape of the chisel edge combined with the displacement of the metal conspired to bevel the top corners of each “band” just slightly, giving each a light-refracting faceted look. From the end of these individual “bands” to either edge of the cuff, he then stamped conjoined triangular patterns to create Eyes of Spirit. Along the inner band, he chase da repeating pattern of single stretched drops that gave an appearance of flowing water. He then oxidized all the stampwork, inside the band and out, and buffed it to a high polish.
So why that particular design, and why such effort?
In many of our cultures, four is a sacred number. It’s found repeatedly in our natural world: the sacred directions, the winds, the seasons, the elemental powers; in some cultures, it extends to sacred medicinal substances, spirit guardians or guides, stages of life, even colors or other more conceptual symbologies. In this instance, it could and did serve multiple representational purposes, including the stages of life — infancy, youth, adulthood, elderhood. It represented the braid, the lines and links, the unbroken hoop that connects us all, from ancestors dating back to the First People to those that will be conceived and born far beyond our own Seventh Generation. The Eyes of Spirit at either side of the spaced bands represent wisdom and guidance: that of the elders, and of those who have long since crossed into the Spirit World. The drops along the inner band symbolized abundance, that which is promised to us if we keep the ways as they were given to us by our elders, by our ancestors, by the spirits.
The name of the work was Honoring the Elders.
At the time, of course elder status seemed much farther away than it does now. It’s a daunting prospect; we are taught to honor our elders in ways that the dominant culture doesn’t understand, and as we lose more of them every year, there’s always a deeply rooted fear that too much wisdom risks being lost with them. But for many of us, our ways also teach that they are still with us: in spirit, in memory, in the lessons and lifeways they imparted that crossed, and continue to cross, generational lines.
Like the water the drops along the inner band evoke, that’s a gift of abundance beyond price.
~ Aji
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