After so many days of unsettled weather swinging wildly between sun and rain and snow driven on the spring winds, today has been a beautiful day: warm, bright, with garlands of gray clouds scudding fast across turquoise skies, steady winds giving way to periods of calm.
In a place where spring is often the most violent of seasons, these are the days for which we live.
They are also the days for which we are profoundly grateful. The wild polarity of the weather this time of year is a constant reminder of our fragility, of how easy it would be to lose much, even all, to the sheer force of elements. And they bring to mind the small and gentle spirit to whom we owe gratitude for the form and shape of our world, the lines and plates that are its skeleton and skin: Grandmother Turtle.
I’ve recounted her story so many times already; there’s no need for detail once again. Suffice to say that, in some traditions, it is to her we owe our world itself, one that holds and sustains us and permits our existence in a cosmos unsuited to our survival at the moment of the First People’s emergence.
And in a week when shelter has figured prominently, webs and lines and spaces between, there is one incarnation of Turtle that such thoughts called immediately to mind.
Today’s featured work dates back about five or six years; it was created, if memory serves, in 2011 or so, but it may not have sold until 2012. That’s often the case with Wings’s larger works; he has always believed that Spirit guides him to make each piece for a specific person who will need what it offers, but the more complex and costly works unsurprisingly often take a little time to meet up with that individual.
Wings has created versions of Turtle for many years, perhaps the whole of his career as an artist. Usually, they are stylized in a very particular fashion, slightly geometric, with straight limbs ending in pointed toes. If I remember correctly, this was the first he created with fully articulated, curving legs. It would not be the last, but as a first iteration, it was an unusually spectacular one.
I no longer recall whether he’d already chosen the stone when he created the setting; I rather suspect that he had, since it was sized so perfectly to the cabochon shown above. But the first step was to fabricate the setting, which meant creating the turtle itself. He began with sheet sterling silver, lightweight enough not to drag on the bail when worn, yet solid enough not to bend or twist. He cut the turtle’s outline freehand with a small jeweler’s saw, following a smooth invisible arc to fashion the flowing curves of its legs. He then used the saw, with a tiny diamond blade inserted in it, to articulate the toes on the hind feet, each toe separated fully from the one next to it.
Next came the stampwork: a pair of tiny round hoops for eyes; straight lines for the toes on the forefeet. The remainder of the stampwork required only two stamps, both similar in shape. Each was a bit like a crescent moon, but with a difference in the depth of the arc — perfect, in other words, for creating reptilian scales of variable effect. For the upper body and front legs, he chose an arc of fairly open, slightly flattened curvature; for the lower body and hind legs, he used one that formed a deeper arc, almost but not quite a half-circle.
He attached a slider-style bail behind the turtle’s head, choosing to keep it plain, spare, smooth silver. Then it was time to set the stone.
And the stone made the necklace. It was a truly spectacular one, a large old oval turquoise cabochon, dark teal in color with a tightly woven black spiderweb matrix. It was a piece from Wings’s collection of old cabochons, acquired so long ago (perhaps even as part of the supply his father had given to him decades ago) that its provenance was no longer a sure thing. Had it been new stone, the webbing and color might have indicated a mine in China, since much of the high-quality stone that is coming out of the Cloud Mountain region in China’s Hubei District today shares a similarity of stone color and matrix patterning. But this one was too old, and most likely hailed from one of the old Nevada mines, perhaps Stormy Mountain. The solid teal color has always been unusual for American turquoise, but that area of Nevada was known to have produced some stone in such a shade, and with the kind of lush inky black spiderweb matrix that appears in this cabochon.
He began by creating a backing for the bezel, solid silver sized slightly larger than the stone itself, the extra millimeters spaced evenly around it. He then fashioned a scalloped bezel to hold it, soldering the wire to the backing. Lastly, he edged the bezel with a slender but substantial strand of twisted silver (which was the reason for creating a slightly larger backing in the first place — to allow room for placement of the twisted silver). Then he set the stone, and buffed the entire pendant to a light sheen, neither the antiqued look of a Florentine finish nor the too-new appearance of a mirror-like polish.
Then it was time to turn the pendant into a necklace.
I have described the stone as teal, and so it was, but you’ll notice that I have not qualified it further, as either teal green or teal blue. That’s because this stone was one of those truly spectacular gems whose color picked up those on either side of its place on the spectrum, seeming green near green beads, blue near blue ones. And Wings had the perfect beads for it.
Beadwork necklaces are nothing new for him, but they are, almost without exception, fashioned of one (or more) of three materials: metal, stone, or shell. Once in a great while, he will use old-style trade beads, usually made of brilliantly colored cut glass or similar materials. But wood? Almost never.
However, at this time, he had one long strand of wooden beads in his inventory. More technically, it was a multi-strand necklace, three or so ropy lengths of polished and painted wooden rondels, each strand strung in a particular color order: The vast majority were roundish beads saturated with an evergreen shade, the color of raw emerald, but they were interspersed at intervals with the same round wooden rondels in other jewel tones — ruby, gold, lapis — the other colors separated by flatter, disc-like rondels painted white and edged with black. Hanging the pendant from this strand produced a changeable effect, with the turquoise cabochon appearing teal green when near the green wooden beads, teal blue near the blue ones. And oddly, the greens seemed the same, and so did the blues, a true optical illusion.
Once complete, it was a beautiful expression of Turtle’s story, all maplike lines and warm earthy jewel tones. In this iteration, Turtle had a unique and distinctive personality, an identity all her own, and yet, her role in forming our world was never far from one’s perception. Suspended as she was from three lines formed of color and wood, arcing lines across her body and a webwork map upon her shell, she was a reminder that we have survived, to live safely within the webbed lines of the world.
~ Aji
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