Tin man teapots

In this second study, quite different in style from my vertical forms, I am exploring the melding images from the early industrial age with the universality of the teapot.  Every potter seems to dabble with the teapot a time or two.  My attempt is to explore the imagery of early cast-iron type inventions, mechanical devices, and pre-high tech machinery that inaugurated the 20^th century.

My earliest attempts were raku-fired, thrown and altered teapots, very similar in style.  The sort of zigzag characters that took on human qualities, such as posture, gesture, etc.  But within the last year, my work has evolved into less dr. Seuss-like playfulness and has moved more towards my attempts to make teapots that look like abandoned, home-made mechanisms, the sort that one might find in an inventor’s garage.  Each teapot is an attempt to capture both human quality/temperament as well as suggest an additional function beyond serving tea. 

Since clay is often associated with vessels, I also have been studying non-ceramic vessels for inspiration,:  oil cans, bottles, coffee grinders.  I begin by mostly throwing the base form for each tin man and then began expanding outward from there with press-molded forms, obscure appendages that would seem to have a purpose (i.e. faucet knobs that might regulate some sort of internal process) and with less decipherable additions, such as blades, vents, hoses, etc. 

This is a series early in its exploration.  I have moved from raku copper-based sand glazes to cone 6 oxidation metallic glazes.  Of course the trompe l’oeil effect adds to the sense that the object before you is at once old, neglected, and perhaps more than an inanimate object with a single function.

most of this inspiration comes from growing up in mining country.  I grew up in elko, nevada where the machinery of grit, dirt, ore, and profit came and went.  The sagebrush grew up and devoured abandoned jalopies as well as rusty, out-of-use heavy equipment.  There is something simultaneously cute about a mechanical teapot as well as disturbing…in short, I want it to be equally likely that tea or gritty oil might come pouring out of the spouts.  It is that play with the daintiness of the teapot and the masculine grit of machinery that is at the heart of this series.