Jet Black Upright Ring Teapot

In the course of exploring new ideas, I often go back to older ideas and review them in the light of what I have learned since that earlier work. After I had started cutting apart and reassembling my handthrown hollow rings, and posing handsculpted animal figures on the completed teapot compositions, I subsequently stopped adding the animal figures and started to explore abstract reassembled hollow ring teapots. The first of this abstract series is the "Pink Pentagonal Cross-Section Teapot," completed in the summer of 1998, and featured in the Ceramics Monthly International Competition of March 1999. While exploring this new series of ideas, I continued to think about the original upright ring teapots I began making in 1995. I decided to try two upright ring teapots without animal figures, and I made a very fat ring like a hollow bagel, and a very skinny large diameter ring, which became this Jet Black Upright Ring Teapot. I added tendrils, stems, and bubbles to the fat ring, and it became my Kelp Forest Undersea Upright Ring Teapot. The skinny large diameter ring, however, had an elegant presence to which I was greatly attracted . Once completed and turned upright, it suggested to me the ring of fire that surrounds Shiva Nataraj, the dancing Shiva of the Hindu pantheon. I chose a satin gloss black glaze to further the impression of fire. The coiled finial on the lid is meant to continue the line of the coiled base, like an inverted tornado. In this artwork I was looking at my original idea, without embellishments or alterations. I am pleased with its elegant simplicity.

This teapot is held in a private collection in Williamstown, MA.