Teapot exhibition leaves much to ponder

By Roger Green
Booth Arts Writer

Look to China for the origin of teapots, whose production flourished 500 years ago in the YiXing region of Jiangsu province, 120 miles northeast of Shanghai. Fabricated from local “zisha” or purple clay, YiXing teapots held only one or two cups of tea, and so had compact bodies, mini lids and short spouts.

YiXing legacies, as they’ve been retained and changed, are spotlighted in “Tea Time: The Art of the Teapot,” a national invitational organized by the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. Continuing through July 15, the exhibit brings together 157 recently created teapots by ceramic artists from 39 states.

The artist who most faithfully re-creates YiXing models, Fong Choo, has contributed “Tangerina,” a diminutive teapot whose spherical, porcelain body, glazed orange, resembles a tangerine. Richard Notkin’s stoneware “Spherical Teapot: Kuwait” likewise repeats YiXing prototypes, with a twist. His small, finely detailed teapot’s feet and spout are miniature oil drums, its handle a mini flame.

Choo’s and Notkin’s inventiveness continues to varying degrees throughout the unusually heterogeneous show. The teapots comprising it are of earthenware, porcelain or stoneware, glazed or unglazed. Their fabrication may entail throwing and turning on a wheel, casting in a mold, or building laboriously by hand.

Yet despite differences, the teapots all exude elegance, audacity or both.

For elegance, look to Ginger Tomshany’s “Midnight Tea” and Peter Beasecker’s “Teapot,” both understated, stoneware pots whose simplified but shapely silhouettes imitate YiXing models. Comparable elegance marks Cary Hulin’s and Peter Pinnell’s stoneware pots.

Traditions of a more recent vintage continue in teapots impacted by the Studio Pottery Movement of the 1950s and ’60s, which combined Eastern and Western philosophies and techniques. Examples include Cynthia Bringle’s stoneware “Teapot” and Bunny McBride’s porcelain “Choi Teapot,” glazed in pale, delicate blue and sporting a bamboo handle.

Significantly, members of the Studio Pottery Movement valued utility over aesthetics. That’s a distinction sharply separating works in the current show, into functional and decorative camps. Many of the most compelling, even mesmerizing, teapots could not be used easily, if at all, for brewing or serving tea.

Several are illusionistic, sometimes to the point of trompe l’oeil. Noi Volkov’s earthenware “Leonardo’s Beauty” reproduces a female face and hand from da Vinci’s painting “Lady with an Ermine.” Real-appearing, three-dimensional fruit appears in Claudia Tarantino’s “Three And A Half” and David Furman’s “The Butler,” both porcelain exercises in trompe l’oeil, colorfully glazed. Tarantino’s toylike basket of fruit includes a napkin whose weave is daintily reproduced in relief. Furman’s teapot is a pile of fruits and vegetables with convincing colors and textures, including a cantaloup’s.

Other teapots portray recognizable subjects but celebrate clay’s physical properties. That’s true of Jeri Hollister’s earthenware “Horse Teapot #2,” pieced together from slabs of clay, some with tool markings in relief. Ray Bub exploits clay’s malleability in his stoneware “Coral Reef Reassembled Ring Teapot,” comprising squared but graceful, curviform shapes, aptly glazed pink.

Some of the teapots appear in sculptural installations. Richard Wehrs’ wall-mounted “Tea Shrine #8″ displays an earthenware pot and two cups in three niches framed by Gothic arches. Scott Rutherford’s stoneware “Tea Set Destroyer” evokes a war ship by arraying pots, cups and pitchers on three contiguous ceramic trays. The nautical impression is increased by glaze that reproduces the protective dazzle pattern seen on wartime ships.

The most audacious work surely is “Liber Tea” by Paul Flickinger, chair of the 3-D department at the School of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts. “Liber Tea” is a free-standing, bisque star, decorated with red and white stripes and with a patch of blue containing other, smaller stars. Flickinger intentionally loaded his clay with ground oyster shells, a ploy that will cause the teapot to crumble over time. A camera pointed at “Liber Tea” is recording its disintegration with timed, 30-minute shots.

Flickinger’s statement may unsettle some viewers. But it underscores the expressive opportunities workaday teapots afford. One of art’s most significant goals is changing the way viewers experience reality. Will visitors to the exhibit ever regard teapots in comfortable, unthinking ways again?

(this article was taken from mlive.com)