Our skies are hazy here today, a pale dirty blue overhead that’s red around the edges. Wildfire smoke is a feature of the season, but not a welcome one.
The forecast says no rain — not today, and not for the next couple of days, either. That is also not a welcome development.
Fortunately, longer-range predictions currently suggest a return to patterns that are, if not precisely “normal,” at least more usual in frequency, if not time of day. We are now down solidly to the business of the season and all the work that attends it, and it is a blessing to be accompanied in that work by the spirits of summer, storm, and sky.
Such thoughts turned my memory to today’s featured throwback work, one that dates back to somewhere between 2007 and 2010 or so. It’s one of the earlier entries in Wings’s informal signature series of collector’s spoons, a longstanding tradition in Southwestern Native silverwork, going back a century and a half or so. These works assumed a variety of forms, from plain silver to those studded with stones, from straight square-off handles to rounded edges, feather shafts, and spirals. This piece fell into the first category, a very traditional style in a slightly larger size than most, and one whose detail work likewise embodied those same spirits of summer, storm, and sky.
The spoons always begin with the silver, at least in terms of execution. A century ago, such pieces were solely cast work; molds were the then-available mechanism for producing three-dimensional shapes, required for a spoon with an actual bowl at the end (i.e., the raised sides that make it useable). Today, it’s possible to buy silver in heavy-gauge sheets that can be hammered and molded into the requisite shapes, obviating the need for the messy process of melting and pouring ingot. Cast work can be very beautiful, and Wings has done plenty of it over the years, but contemporary advances provide silversmiths with a great deal more flexibility in design, and that is where his primary interest lies now.
The spoon itself was utterly simple: a perfect plain teaspoon, one the size of an ordinary teaspoon hand-cut to shape, long oval bowl with lightly raised sides, rising to a slender neck, then gradually flaring outward up the length of the handle to a straight-cut end. But because of the shaping involved, stampwork that might ordinarily come second comes first with such designs as these. Wings lightly traced the spoon’s eventual parameters, freehand, on the silver, then proceeded with the stampwork before cutting out the piece.
And the stampwork was complex, both in design and in execution. He set aside a blank space at the very end that would ultimately hold the square Skystone cabochon seen in the photo, beginning the accent work immediately below it. And once complete, the handle read, like a petroglyph, of a summer’s day in this place, a story of the forces and spirits at work and play.
He began, at the top of the handle, with a tiny hoop, a solitary orb; beneath it, he placed a pair of inverted crescents comprising the rays of a rising light, each facing outward, their backs nearly joined by a single straight line. Beneath these motifs of radiant light, he placed a trio of hoops, small spheres like sun, moon, and earth together.
Below these images of the heavens, he crafted a story of the middle atmosphere, a Zia-like symbol of the Four Sacred Directions, flanked at top and bottom by signifiers of the storm: a thunderhead-and-rain motif turned upside-down above the center motif, then right side up below it. Beneath the last thunderhead, the story moves to earth, with a flowering motif repeated three times, ending in a ray-like petal. This series of symbols took up nearly the entire upper half of the handle. The remainder of it was devoted to a single stamp, chased in an alternating pattern down its length: an curving arch with a tiny hoop centered beneath its apex, a motif that, placed in a repeating alternating pattern, represents flowing water. In this instance, it was what results here from a proper rainy season, rivers and ditches and streams alive with the full flow of the first medicine.
In this instance, though, the imagery was given purpose, specific and personal. Beneath the flowing-water design, a single pointed sunrise symbol at the neck gave way to three directional arrows at the top of the spoon’s bowl: directing the flow of water to the person who would use the spoon to drink or eat.
Once the stampwork on the front was complete,Wings excised the spoon from the silver around it, then filed the edges smooth. This was fairly thick, heavy-gauge silver, the kind more normally used to create a substantial cuff; cutting the piece out, freehand, involved no small amount of labor. He turned it over to stamp his hallmark on the reverse, then placed its bowl, still face down, on an inverted anvil and gently hammered it, repoussé-fashion, into the proper shape. Turning it right side up again, he fashioned a small, perfectly square bezel at the very end of the handle. He oxidized the entire piece, paying particular attention to the stampwork, and buffed it to a medium-high polish. Lastly, he set the bezel with a lightly-domed square cabochon of what Arizona turquoise (either Sleeping beauty or Kingman, but my instincts say Kingman from the look of it) — a perfect sky blue, the very color of the heavens on a high-desert summer’s morning.
This was, if memory serves, perhaps the fourth or fifth of his spoon series, which means that it was most likely created in 2007 or 2008. It was also, I always thought, one of his most powerful, in size, shape, and symbolism. It also, if my memory does not fail me, one that sold almost immediately, a collector’s item that found its home with astonishing rapidity.
It’s been a while since Wings has created any new entries in his series of collector’s spoons — a good long while, in fact, since he’s crafted anything in any of his various signature series of collectible miniatures at all. But this one still speaks, as softly and powerfully as the seasonal rains and the waters and the beings that attend them: the spirits of summer, storm, and sky.
~ Aji
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