African Elephants Surprise Box

Before I started making Upright Ring and Reassembled Ring Teapots, I was making Surprise Boxes.  The origin of these pieces came when I was teaching Ceramic Art at the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts from 1992 to 1994.  There were only 6 potter’s wheels for 12 students, so I would assign a handbuilding project as well as a wheel project for each weekly class meeting, and the students would take turns working at the worktable and the wheel.  One of the handbuilding projects was a closed-form slab box, and another was a figurative animal or human sculpture. 

I started to perch my figurative sculptures on top of my slab-built boxes, and then I got the idea to also hide a figurative sculpture inside the box.  I would glaze the box and figures separately, then put them together in the glaze kiln and allow the melted glaze to glue the figures onto the lid and inside the box.  You may see a photo of one of my early efforts in the Articles section of this web site, “Puffin-Handled Box,” on page 50 of the November 1995 Ceramics Monthly magazine article, “Teaching In The Studio.”

In the beginning I made quickly and casually-modeled figures of frogs, pigs, dogs, cats, penguins, and other animals, but soon grew dissatisfied with their cartoon-like appearance, and started consulting book and magazine pictures of the animals I wanted to model.  I remember looking in our bird identification books to see details of how a Pacific Puffin looks for the Puffin Box.  I challenged myself to increase my knowledge and skill, both in sculpting and glazing, until I had accumulated a stack of animal picture books and magazines at least two feet tall!  Often I would spread out and consult more than a dozen pictures to be able to visualize every detail of each animal.  Animals I eventually modeled, as anatomically correctly and species-specific as I could achieve, included the African rhinoceros, King penguin, Pacific puffin, Parson’s and Oustalet’s chameleons, North American mountain goat, Giant panda, African giraffe, Mountain gorilla, and Madagascar lemur, as well as the sea turtles and elephants depicted here.

My concept was to have an adult mother figure on the lid, and when the viewer opens the box the baby of the species is displayed inside.  I chose the African elephant rather than the Indian elephant as my subject, because the African elephant has larger ears, and I liked their look better.  In the course of my research on elephant sculpture, I found that elephants are most often sculpted with their trunks raised, as this represents a so-called “happy elephant.”  I had done this instinctively and in ignorance of this convention.  Both male and female adult elephants have tusks, so I put tusks on the lid figure, but babies and juveniles do not grow tusks until adulthood, so the baby inside the Surprise Box has none.  I mixed a special matt gray glaze to represent the non-reflective surface of the elephant’s hide, and glazed the surface of the thrown spherical Surprise Box in matt and glossy greens/browns/purples to represent the jungle habitat of the African Elephant.  I am particularly proud of my success in capturing the proportions and surface qualities of the African elephant in this “African Elephants Surprise Box.”

I like these Surprise Boxes very much, but set the series aside soon after I completed my first reassembled ring teapot without animal figures, the “Pink Pentagonal Cross-Section Reassembled Ring Teapot,” which eventually found its way onto the cover of the March 2002 Ceramics Monthly magazine.  I had to concentrate on one focus the relatively small amount of creative clay work time I had available, and I chose the reassembled ring teapots as a richer and more rewarding avenue of artistic inquiry.

This Surprise Box is for sale.
Price: $800

If you are interested in purchasing it please visit the Ordering Information section.

In addition to my unique reassembled ring teapots, my partner Susan Nykiel and I also make a wide range of functional and elegant pottery pieces. Please visit our new online store at oakbluffspottery.etsy.com to see what we have to offer! This is an excellent place to shop for beautiful handmade pottery for your own home or for your gift-giving pleasure.