We’ve devoted this week to the motifs of movement: of directionality and guidance, of blazing trails and drawing maps, of marking one’s journey and finding one’s place in the world.
Today, our throwback work is one that embodies these same themes, while simultaneously hinting at the blessings of a warmer season. For this one, we go back about five years, to a piece that was entitled, simply Turtle Shell.
It’s a cuff that has found its home on the West Coast, in a land that tends to be much warmer than and at least as green as our own here. The last few years, though, have seen that part of Turtle Island buffeted by winds and wildfires, decimated by drought, and I have no doubt that those who live there are right holding fast to the hope and promise of a greener warm season this year.
The genesis of this cuff’s name is obvious; one need only look at the cabochon that forms the focal point of the piece to see its origins. It was a beautiful old round cabochon of deep emerald-green turquoise, one that had been in Wings’s inventory of stones for many years. It is just possible that it came from the old Carico Lake mine, but based on color, matrix patterning, and the bright white inclusions in it, we were confident in pegging it as Damele turquoise. The region that is home to the Damele Mine is one of those areas that produces both turquoise and variscite, and both stones bear certain hallmarks, among them a spectrum of stone color that ranges from off-white to a bronzed light brown to greens that run from seafoam to an electric lime to jade and finally a hue the color of dark raw emerald. The darker green shades of Damele turquoise are especially prized, and are accordingly especially valuable. This was an old natural stone, only lightly domes and cut in a perfect round circle, then polished to a high gloss.
What was especially spectacular about this stone, apart from the jade-colored stone webbed with a matrix of dark emerald contrasted with white, was the patterning of the matrix: It looked like the plates of a turtle’s armored shell, all connected, yet held separate from each other by edge and space. And once that imagery comes clear, it’s no leap at all to see in it the plates that form this continent we call Turtle Island: summer’s rolling lands of bright green nestled among darker waters, ridged here and there with the gold-white tips of mountain ridgelines. It looks like a map for a warm green world, our own world at the lush and abundant midpoint of the season we call summer.
Such a stone can stand on its own; it needs no extra adornment or distraction. And so Wings chose to set it in a bezel that was simple in the extreme, scalloped edges and a delicate embrasure of twisted wire its only accents.
Wings set the stone upon the center of a heavy-gauge sterling silver band, one that was narrow in width, yet solid and substantial enough to require a bit of work in shaping. Before that point, however, came the stampwork, and it was both simple and spectacular.
First, this piece, like so many of Wings’s works, holds a secret: stampwork hidden on the inner band, a gift to the wearer, private symbolism to be held close against the skin. In this case, he chased the entire inner band with a set of traditional patterns merged together, built around a triangular shape that may be used variously to represent mountain peaks or lodges, combined here with other stampwork in a way that evokes the Eye of Spirit. The inner band, the side worn against the skin, thus summons the symbols of healing, protection, wisdom, and guidance, all by way of a grounding earthy motif.
The outer band, that exposed to the rest of the world, he kept extraordinarily simple. He chased half-moon patterns down either edge, symbols that can represent femininity, but can also be used to evoke the power of the tides and the guidance of the moon’s nighttime glow along the path. In the valley where each tiny moon joined with the next, he placed a single tiny sacred hoop, the image that for us represents both the cycle of life and its infinite and eternal sacredness. Additional hoops accented the narrow sides of the band, again in a repeating pattern.
It was, on the surface, one of his simpler works, spare in design and elegant in execution. But the imagery he brought to bear in it, to merge and meld and combine into something greater than the sum of its parts, was complex indeed.
This stone, perfect as a simulacrum of our world at its most abundant, deserved an equally powerful setting to support it. Wings gave it one: a setting that honored Grandmother Turtle’s gift to the people, the gift of our world in its finest dress, a setting that mapped its secret places and sacred spaces.
~ Aji
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