Art To A Tea

Tea is a soothing beverage but crafting a teapot can be a creative challenge for an artist.

“A teapot is complicated because it has so many parts,” said Susanne Lesny of Camp Hill. “It’s really such an ancient art, and, actually in classes, a teapot is one of the projects because it’s got so many elements.”

Technique — melding the physical parts of the body, lid, spout and handle — is just one aspect, she said. “You also have the artistic. You have to see it from the balance and the shape and the line of design,” said Lesny, one of several Pennsylvania craftsmen whose work is exhibited in the “Radius Showcase Series — Tea Traditions” in Radius, the Harrisburg Area Community College Gallery and Museum Shop in The State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg.

Artists gravitate toward pottery because of the “creative aspect. There is so much variety, so many ways that you can express yourself,” said Lesny, who fashioned a hand-built tan patchwork teapot and tea caddy for the exhibit.

In hand-building, the clay is rolled, cut, textured, shaped and fastened with slip. The other method to make pottery is by shaping it on a pottery wheel. Firing in a kiln dries and hardens the pieces.

“I do both, but I really like hand building,” said Lesny, 65. “The finished product is not round. You can make it any shape or any combination of shapes that you want. It’s much more extemporaneous,” said Lesny, who made her first tea set four years ago.

Jessica Lantz, Radius curator of arts and assistant manager, said teapots, teacups, tea caddies and tea bowls were chosen as the theme of Radius’ first showcase series because so many craftsmen make them. “While traditionally the designs were purely functional, craftsmen now are making abstract teapots that incorporate contemporary ideas,” she said.

Kevin Lehman’s exhibit pieces have a clean contemporary look arrived at after “a lot of drawing and sketching to get ideas. Through my designs, I ended up making these teapots with the elongated spouts and handles. It really references the human figure with the hand on the hip and the hand out to the side,” said Lehman of Lancaster.

Lehman, 32, pairs an arms akimbo red pedestal teapot with a 3-inch light blue pedestal teacup with an indentation on the rim. The set creates the illusion of the small cup pulling back from the railing tea pot.

In a play on words of scalding hot tea and scolding stance, Lehman titles his entry in the exhibit “Scolding Teapot and Teacup.” To create the pieces, Lehman combined the potter’s wheel and hand building.

Lehman said he is drawn to pottery because “it’s down to earth, no pun intended. I feel like I am natural and the way I go about doing things is natural and free flowing, so the material really fits me. Creativity is my passion. It’s spontaneous and limitless.”

Philip Haralam, 27, another Lancaster ceramist, said his teapot in the exhibit was the evolution of a series. “It was a series of a dozen. Each one changed and evolved in trying to make it interesting in a design that’s pleasing to eye, but then also arrives at that line of functionality.”

Haralam said he primarily makes “wheel thrown pottery or ceramics, but I do other sculptural and decorative pieces. This exhibition came at the right time,” Haralam said. “It fit into what I had already done.”

Lesny said “a lot of potters will say the clay will decide what it wants to be and that’s often the truth. It has its limitations and it will only do certain things for you, and you have to follow the rules of what the clay is willing to become as you work with it.

“There’s many failures because of that. You try to do something and it comes out of the kiln cracked or the seams pop apart. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong, and that’s because the nature of the clay is what it is and you have to learn how to work with that,” Lesny said.

This article was taken from: pennlive.com