This day feels like August — in my own homelands. Hot, humid, dawn breaking across a heavy gray sky; now, toward midday, blue sky is showing through, but the light remains a wan mix of gray and pale yellow.
Where I was born, this would be a very ordinary day. It’s less so here, especially in this new era of megadrought.
Still, the clouds that only an hour ago had begun to separate are already recoalescing, this time building themselves into impossibly how towers with great black bases spreading wide. These are the historically-customary patterns here for August, albeit without the heavy humidity we’re experiencing now.
Still, despite the suffocatingly oppressive feel, we cannot bring ourselves to complain about it much. It’s bringing the medicine of the water so long denied this land now, and with it, the small spirits that help keep it alive and in at least some small measure of balance.
Despite the heat and the recent heavy rains, we have had fewer mosquitoes than only a couple of weeks ago, and it has occurred to me that perhaps that is due to the small influx of dragonflies over that period. An adult dragonfly can reportedly eat a hundred mosquitoes in the space of a day, and while in my own watery lands that may not sound like much, here, that has the potential to destroy entire colonies. In a world beset now by multiple pandemics at once, and with hard personal experience of the damage West Nile can do, their appearance seems like a small but significant victory for our small space’s well-being.
In my language, the word for dragonfly shares roots with the words for bottle or flask, no doubt because of their long slender shape and colorful glass-like translucence, and with the word for sailor, for which the associations of water and flight should be fairly obvious. And here, we have this year seen a wide diversity of sizes and colors along their kind, from tiny blue and purple damselflies to giant brown and white, black and white, and red rock skimmers, and a few of the flashing and flashy giants that I suspect are blue and green darners — like their butterfly cousins, they move so rapidly and settle so seldom that’s impossible to get more than the occasional glimpse.
But what matters is that they are here, here along with the rains if not with enough surface waters to fill the pond, and we are grateful for their presence. In some traditions, they, too, are messengers, and their very physical form and function makes them perfect for the role: metamorphosis and transformation, speed of flight, the ability to move in all six directions (up, down, forward, backward, and to either side), and the ability to hover long enough to impart whatever wisdom is theirs to carry.
And if ever there were a time for heeding the messengers, it is now.
From such a vantage point, this week’s featured #ThrowbackThursday work seems almost prophetic now. It was, I believe, the very first in a small informal (and very intermittent) series by Wings wrought deliberately in the most vintage of styles. This small necklace dates back to the middle of June in 2010, more than a dozen years ago now. And lest you think my use of the word “prophetic” is embellishment, by that point we had been observing (and experiencing the early ravages of) climate change in real time for a half-decade, at least. In truth, it had been going on far longer than that, but some four to six year prior to the creation of this work was in fact the point at which the changes in climate, weather, and season had become undeniable.
At any rate, in the summer of 2010, Wings was inspired to create a few small, relatively inexpensive works in a tribute to the oldest forms of Indigenous silverwork: ingot, melted, poured, rolled, hammered, and the adorned with simple stampwork. It’s why the medallion is irregularly shaped, and why he permitted the crack at the right-hand side to remain. In the old days, without benefit of power tools and commercial molds, silver had to be melted down (back then, usually from coins, which originally were made entirely of silver, unlike now). It was an arduous process, and a hot and somewhat dangerous one, too, heating the metal to melting point, pouring it into whatever mold could be fashioned, allowing it to cool and breaking it out, then rolling or hammering it into useable form.
To create the pieces in this series, of course, required only small amounts of silver, and once they were molded into ball shapes and cooled, Wings hammered them flat. A hundred years ago and more, the hammering and rolling stages were tricky points in the process, because unlike modern commercial molds and presses, the force and weight of the hammer is neither simultaneously nor evenly distributed. The result is that certain parts of the piece will be microscopically thicker or thinner than others, and of course, in any such precess, the edges tend to thin out more (and more rapidly) than the center. That causes the edges to crack and separate. If you’ve ever rolled out a pie crust, you’ll understand the dynamics instantly: the center of the dough is always the thickest, and the edges crack and spread apart, so you always roll it out beyond the edges of the pie pan so that you can trim the breakage off with a paring knife.
But a century and more ago, it wasn’t possible to pare the cracked edges off a piece of metal. You either re-melted the piece, starting the process all over again (and likely picking up microscopic contaminants along the way that might increase the amount of breakage next time around), or you simply accepted its presence. For many of our peoples, acceptance would have been the natural response anyway, in recognition of the truth that only Spirit can create that which is perfect, and the belief that showing flaws or mistakes was a necessary expression of humility.
And so Wings decided to conform these to the old ways, itself perhaps a sign of heeding the messengers whose image would ultimately adorn it. He began by cranking the ingot by hand through the rolling mill. This takes the silver from a thick mass (usually a ball or similar lump) and, via repeated passes through the mill, its rollers tightened a little more each time, gradually flattens it. It’s hard, heavy labor that puts a lot of stress on hands and shoulders.
Once he had the piece flattened to the general thickness he wanted, he then hammered it by hand to even it out. Jewelers and smiths keep on hand a large variety of hammers, from heavy five-pound flat-head steel hammers to ball-peen hammers in varying sizes to wood and wrapped raw-hide mallets. For this, he would likely have given it a few quick passes with the five-pound steel hammer to even it out rather roughly, then followed up with the rawhide mallet to smooth the displaced silver more gently. The crack would have appeared during the milling process, and he elected to keep it.
Once he was satisfied with the flatness of the surface, he set about creating the stampwork design for the dragonfly. For this he used a total of six stamps: circles in three separate sizes and patterns, one short curving arc, one short chisel-end stamp, and one divot-end stamp. he wold have begin with the circles: a medium-sized hoop with a wide edge for the top of the body, followed by a slightly larger hoop with a slimmer edge just below it. Then he would have moved on to the third round stamp, a small circle with a very wide edge, leaving the “open” center to rise from the silver as a small round dot. He used one of these for the head (the inner dots resembled stylized eyes), and then traced a curving arc of seven more beneath the body to form the long segmented tail. If you look closely at them in the photo above, you’ll also see the coarser texture of the ingot surrounding them. The single short arc he used twice, to create the antennae. He reversed the direction of the stamp so that each antenna curved up and outward. Then he would have turned his attention to the wings.
If you look at the photo, you’ll notice that the dragonfly is not centered vertically , but appears at an angle. This was to accommodate the ingot’s irregular shape; he would need to place the bail at the back a little off-center to get the pendant to hang properly, and besides making it harder to fit the whole design into the available surface area, the odd shape would have made the design look even odder had he tried to place the dragonfly’s head straight up at the top. As you can see, it’s roughly centered in the angled view shown here, but there was another reason for that, too: the wings.
Dragonfly wings extend widely on either side of the body, and there are two per side. To keep the stampwork in proportion, he needed a wide surface area in which to create them, and so he chose the widest point of the pendant, very near the top of the right edge (right side to the wearer), but a few millimeters below the left edge. For this, he chose a single chisel-end stamp with a very short blade end, and he used this to score the edges of the four wings through repeated strikes, angling them outward from the body in a slight flare, then angling them downward at the end, to connect the lines and create a wedge shape. He then took the tiny divot-end stamp and struck it repeatedly between the lines delineating each of the four wings, texturizing them much like those of their real-life counterparts, whose wings appear like fragile lace.
Once the stampwork was complete, he created a small loop bail on the reverse, just below the top of the pendant, and added his hallmark. Then he oxidized all the stampwork thoroughly and buffed it a low polish: not Florentine, but also not enough polishing strength to buff out the natural pits and texture of the rolled-ingot surface. All that remained was to string it on a strand of sterling silver snake chain, attach the findings, bless it, and offer it in inventory.
It’s been too many years for me to remember who purchased this one. If memory serves, he created somewhere between three and six of these in fairly rapid succession, but which I mean over a period of weeks during the course of that summer. He’s created a few since; the only one remaining inventory is actually that rarest of items on offer, a necklace and earrings set actually sold as a set, and it will appear in this space tomorrow.
He saw the photo over my shoulder this morning as I began work on today’s post. It prompted him to speculate on the possibility of creating a new version, this one with a butterfly stamped at the center in the same geometric fashion.
Perhaps that was Dragonfly’s message this day, unbeknownst to me — a suggestion to get back to this very old traditional style. If nothing else, Wings is known for heeding the messengers of the spirits.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2022; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
