For once, this day shows no signs of dissolving into rain. It’s a running joke here; the fourth, the powwow, and the fiestas, all in the first three weeks of July, also fall in the heart of the monsoon season, and the weather treats them accordingly.
It never bothers us, of course; we don’t celebrate the fourth anyway, and rain is far too necessary to our world’s survival not to welcome it whenever it chooses to come. Still, at the moment, it is a picture-perfect summer’s day outside: light blue skies, warm clear air, the gentlest of breezes, and only a few slender bands of fluffy white clouds around the south and west horizons. Before long, though, the warm air will turn hot, the light shimmering white with the heat. A little ice in our water will be a very welcome thing.
Today’s featured work suits a day such as this very well, seeming to embody both the white-hot light and the ice that is its antidote. It was, in fact, this simple but powerful piece’s name: Ice. [It was also the name of my beloved white mustang, a rescue horse who, starved, abused, abandoned, found his way to us one Christmas Eve and stayed with us until the cancer hiding deep within his body took him from us, now nearly two years ago.]
Southwestern Native jewelry has, over the last century, had certain so-called “norms” imposed on it from without by the colonial art market. Dealers decided that certain styles were “authentic,” and nothing else would do, and so it’s not unusual to see, among dealer inventories, virtually pieces within certain categories hewing entirely to the same style under a label they call “traditional.” Some of them qualify for the descriptor in Indigenous terms; others don’t, but in a colonial culture, true authenticity has never been the point. [And it’s one of many reasons why you see so many younger Native artists doing as Wings has done and branching out on their own, declining to sell their work wholesale through white middlemen and instead remaining true to their own Indigenous visions.]
With regard to rings, the dealer’s idea of authentic style typically runs to what is, in practical terms, most often a man’s ring: large, wide, heavy band rife with stampwork or overlays, with a big turquoise stone in the center. Wings has certainly created such versions according to his own vision, but more often, he refuses to be boxed into any given style, preferring instead to let silver, stone, and spirit speak their own truth, their own identity.
And so it is that he very frequently creates his rings in a superlatively simple style: spare, mostly unadorned, allowing the natural beauty of precious metal and precious gem to shine. These are rings built around bold, large stones, typically with bands to match. About a decade ago, he crafted an entire informal series of them over a period of months and year, using an incredible diversity of gemstone cabochons: turquoise, lapis, rosarita, amber, moonstone, chrysoprase, garnet . . . even quartz. And today’s featured throwback is one of the series, the only one wrought in a stunning display of white quartz.
As cabochons go, white quartz is not very common; most suppliers and lapidarists tend toward the rose and smoky varieties, with occasional ventures into rutilated yellow quartz or other colors. White quartz is most often found these days in “crystals” — a reference not to their actual form, but to the multi-billion-dollar commercial industry that has sprung up in recent decades around New Age concepts of stones (wands, sceptres, pendulums, etc.). Neither of us knows, all these years later, where, when, or how Wings happened to acquire this cabochon, but it was nothing short of spectacular: probably some millimeters long by about ten millimeters across, very highly domed, and shot trough with beautifully curving rutile that followed the cabochon’s internal arc.
White quartz is also one of those stones that, cut and cabbed, often appears very different from how most people are used to seeing it, which is usually in its terminated-crystal form, lightly polished, still opaque, and most snow-white. But a piece that’s small enough and thin enough to turn into a cabochon used for jewelry is far more translucent, and also usually displays a far greater spectrum of “white” color, ranging from earthy brown and gold to pure white to silver the color of cracked winter ice.
This particular cabochon contained them all, and more. But when you looked at it squarely, it resembled nothing so much as a small oval lake on the edges of winter, frozen but having thawed slightly, its surface spiderwebbed with cracks, then melted and refrozen over and over again, the light of a cloud-covered sun filtering through it to create a small translucent white world of ice.
And that was how the ring got its name: Ice. But how to do justice to it?
The answer, of course, was to treat it as that lake in miniature, to let it crackle and shimmer and glow, unencumbered by anything save the embrace of silver light. And so it became one in Wings’s informal series of simple solitaires.
And when I say “simple,” I refer to the appearance, which was almost archetypally so: plain wide-ish band, plain low-profile bezel, cabochon; nothing more. But as with most things in life that appear simple, the doing of it was more complex.
Wings began with a length of sterling silver of a fairly substantial gauge, cut about three-eighths of an inch wide (if memory serves). It had to be lightweight enough to be susceptible to shaping, yet heavy enough not to bend; he also wanted the band itself to exhibit a spare, elegant substance and solidity. Once cut to size, he filed the edges smooth, then placed it on a mandrel and shaped it gentle in two ways: first, lengthwise, to hammer each edge downward in the slightest of curves; then, horizontally, to form the circle of the band. The former step, though, is important here, because it’s what gave the band, and thus the ring, a sense of form and depth. The band itself , once complete, resembled half-round ingot wire, except that its arc was nowhere near that of a half-circle; the curvature created only the gentlest of slopes downward on either side.
Once the hammer-and-mandrel work was complete, Wings turned his attention to the bezel. The depth of the stone was sufficient to permit him to create a plain, low-profile version: simple, spare, elegant; nothing that would deflect attention from the stone, even as it held it securely. Once this thin band of silver and its backing were complete, he soldered them securely to the top center of the band, then oxidized the joins and buffed the entire piece to a soft Florentine finish, giving it a texture that evoked both silk and velvet simultaneously.
Then it was time to set the stone. You’ll notice, in the angle at which he took the photo, that the base of the stone at center right appears almost golden, with hints of darker shades at the base, the color then rising to fan out across the stone in fine white gossamer tendrils, a bit like the silk of a particularly fine spiderweb. Those strands are rutile, the inclusions common to quartz that usually manifest in the same color as the stone itself, sometimes appearing perfectly translucent, sometimes in lighter or darker tints of the same shade. And sometimes, as with this one, it gives the wearer the gift of a small spectrum of light.
This ring seemed to be one of winter’s own works, but it strikes me now that it’s just as apt for this season: the horizontal glow of heat waves, midsummer’s shimmering silver arc.
They are not visible here yet today, but the mercury is only at the mid-eighties now; it will get much warmer before the day is out. Warm enough, perhaps, for us to dream of ice — the better to cool the strands of brilliant white-hot light.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2019; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
