Green Sea Turtle 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. There are eight species of Sea Turtles, and at different
times I sculpted the Hawksbill Sea Turtle, the Black Sea Turtle,
and in this example the Green Sea Turtle. With this Surprise Box,
which is thrown on the wheel rather than slab-built, I glazed the
outside green/blue to represent the oceans that the young turtles
swim in as they grow and mature, and in which they eventually mate
with males. The pregnant mother sea turtle then returns to
the beach where she was born, crawls laboriously out of the sea
onto the sand, digs a hole, and lays over a hundred eggs. She
then covers them with sand, crawls back into the surf, and continues
her life at sea. I glazed the inside of the Surprise Box
with our bronze tan matt glaze to represent the beach sand, and
sculpted several round turtle eggs, some clay eggshell pieces,
and 3 baby sea turtles in various stages of emergence from their
eggs. I am very proud of this ceramic art sculpture, “Green
Sea Turtle 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. |
