Last night’s trickster weather amounted to very little: a few dozen scattered drops amid rotational winds, and a sighting of Coyote, that chief among tricksters, trotting confidently across the field on south-to-west diagonal.
Today, the sun is back, but so, too, is the pall of wildfire smoke to the west, and we are reminded that at this season, there are no guarantees of safety anywhere.
We explored here yesterday the protective qualities of the summer season through the lens of Wings’s most recent work, an extraordinary example of freehand stampwork on solid silver. The motifs used, a lodge symbol interspersed with a radiant Eye of Spirit, put me in mind of another work from the same category from some eight years ago, one of a small series of heavy sterling silver wire cuffs he turned into stampwork masterpieces. Some were heavy half-round wire, sculpted and scored and stamped, ends hammered flat and smooth. Some were equally heavy triangle wire, like the one featured here today: stamped on either side of the triangle’s apex in impossibly deep and even traditional patterns.
Wings has been a silversmith for decades, an artist even longer (the latter virtually from birth). Over those many years, he has developed a distinctive style all his own, but through it all, he has never gotten complacent about his knowledge or his skills. He’s always learning, always experimenting with new techniques, always polishing his existing skills and talents. And through all of those decades, there have been a variety of turning points, for lack of a better word, where some particular aspect of those talents and skills came fully and completely into their own.
This particular series of cuffs, from somewhere around 2012, if memory serves, marked one such turning point. His stampwork, always freehand, had always been exceptionally meticulous, but this one small series seemed to elevate it to a whole new level: deep, even, consistent, all the lines clean and spare, the motifs thrown into sharp relief. It laid the groundwork for the kind of work that shows in yesterday’s featured new piece, and today’s featured throwback shows these qualities to spectacular effect.
And ironically (or perhaps not), the imagery in the two works share much in common. But both began with the silver.
I’ve written many times about sterling silver “wire,” which is both a term of art in silversmithing and a bit of misnomer in ordinary parlance. It refers to silver (or any metal used to make it) that is melted from ingot and poured into long, narrow molds, then cooled and released from the mold to form extremely long segments of solid metal in a variety of shapes and sizes. “Wire” ranges from very heavy-gauge blocks to the thinnest of filaments, and it’s produced in square, round, half-round, triangle, bead, and pattern forms (the last, where the pattern is etched into the mold and appears on the surface of the cooled silver). Wings uses narrower, lightweight pattern wire for a whole host of accent purposes. But the heavier-gauge smooth wire in geometric shapes is also perfect for the creation of cuff bracelets.
And in this instance, he chose what was probably nine-gauge sterling silver triangle wire to create today’s featured throwback work.
Now, for an experienced silversmith, the creation of a plain wire cuff is not particularly difficult. It requires enough strength and steadiness to cut the wire evenly and hammer it gently into shape around a mandrel. A plain cuff, especially those made with half-round or square wire that present flat or only gently-curved upper surfaces can also fairly easily be set with stones, the bezels soldered directly onto the surface.
Triangle wire presents other difficulties.
As you can see both above and below, the grade of the triangles sides leading from base to apex is relatively steep. It’s also relatively narrow, even on larger wire such as this. Have you ever tried stamping metal on a perfectly flat surface? it’s not nearly as easy as it looks. It requires a steady, sure hand, and not a little strength put behind the strike of the hammer to transfer the image into the metal with any degree of depth and distinctiveness.
Now try it when you’re not working on a flat surface, but rather, on a very narrow strip angled upright in front of you, nothing on which to brace it.
It’s a whole other skill set.
And now, think about taking your stamp motif and chasing down the entire surface of the band’s sides — not one side, but both, making them a mirror image of each other, spacing each one and equal distance apart, rendering them evenly and of like depth.
Wings did exactly that, and used exactly three stamps to create this cuff.
At either side of the apex, bases meeting each other in the middle, was a triangular motif that he uses for a variety of purposes. Embedded in its center and raising up from its edges are ray-like shapes, and so occasionally he presses it into service to symbolize a sunrise, or light in some form. Because of its triangular form, and the landscape in which he works, it also sometimes represents the mountain.
And, as here, he regularly uses its three-pointed geometry to signify that structure that is such an integral part of some of his traditions: what some call the Native American Church, or the Tipi Way, because meetings are held in, yes, tipis.
In some cultures, the tipi is traditional housing. In others, it’s used as a lodge, for ceremony. In some, it’s both. And in the now-intertribal tradition that is the Native American Church, it is an essential component. Both Wings’s father and his uncle were Road Men, and Wings grew up immersed in such traditional ways.
And so, this piece became entitled, simply, Tipis.
What interests me, in terms of its comparison to yesterday’s brand new work, is the juxtaposition of lodge symbols with another motif. There, it was a radiant Eye of Spirit, signifying illumination and wisdom and guidance. Here, it’s a combination of two stamps arrayed together down the band’s length on both sides: a crescent repeated at the edges, and a single curving droplet-like image placed directly between each end of each arc. If you turn the cuff so that its apex is at the bottom, with the edge at the top? It looks very much like the pattern of a line of tipis beneath a series of clouds, each pair releasing the rain.
And in this place, rain is abundance. Rain is prosperity.
And so, taken together, this piece became a story of protection, of shelter from the storm, sufficient to allow the storm to produce abundance. One truth our peoples have always known is that power is not, in itself, essentially good or bad; it’s how it is used, harnessed, the effects it produces that are subject to such qualitative measurements. And so the summer rains that spawn damaging flash floods are the same ones that nurture and heal the land, that cause the corn to grow. Like water’s elemental opposite, fire, it’s capable of great destruction, but also of cleansing, purifying, healing and medicine, too.
At this season, we welcome the shelter of a summer storm.
And now, as I write, the blue skies of morning have nearly vanished behind the veil of gray thunderheads moving inexorably overhead. A forecast originally for some 5% chance of rain has now morphed into 55%, and the feel of water hangs heavy in the air.
In this drought, rain becomes shelter of another sort now. Perhaps this day will grant us its protections, and its medicine.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2020; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owner.
