Cardew Club News » unique teapots

To Noi Volkov, a simple faucet, a model of a Ford Thunderbird and photos of Marilyn Monroe and Woody Allen are more than just odds and ends.

To him, they are the makings for a ceramic teapot.

“I am trying to create a new, unorthodox style of ceramics,” said the 60-year-old Owings Mills man. “It’s a mixture of Renaissance and pop art. It has a little bit of Dali and some Picasso.”

The teapot uses the back of the T-bird model as a handle, the faucet as the spout, and images of Monroe and Allen on either side of the body.

A British air force crew had to use a teapot to mend a hole in their plane.
The Royal Air Force squad were attempting to drop a satellite buoy into the sea at 8,000ft when a metal plate failed to open fully. The crew decided to use a teapot on board to fill the gap.

Master aircrew Neil Campbell, of 201 Squadron at RAF Kinloss, said: “It was a simple case of covering up a hole to stop the wind whistling in. It had no safety implications and really is a storm in a teapot.” The Nimrod plane, which had been out on an operational flight, was returning to the Cornish air base when the problem occurred.

So many artists in the past 10 years have used the teapot as a canvas for every sort of inventive interpretation. How and why this common household item has morphed into an art object has always intrigued me.

So when I learned a workshop on the teapot form with a premier potter named Fong Choo was offered at the Evanston (Ill.) Art Center, I could not sign up fast enough.

Most of us have a favorite artist, be it Henri Matisse or Georgia O’Keeffe — but how many of us have a teapot with our favorite artist’s likeness in 3-D?

Susan Sloan, 32, of Charlotte has just such a teapot. This whimsical object depicts the face of Marc Chagall as well as several famous images from his paintings, and is her prized possession.

The painted porcelain teapot is “not remotely functional.” It’s rectangular and not meant to be “anything but beautiful.”

Steeped in Tradition: the 19th annual Teapot Show opened last Saturday at Ariana Gallery in Royal Oak featuring elegant, whimsical and edgy teapots by more than 40 nationally recognized artists.

Gallery owner Anne Kuffler said that every year she’s amazed at the variety of work, and this year is no exception. Most of the teapots are ceramic, but there are several blown-glass pieces, like the stylish murrini-patterned teapots by Paul Counts and the colorful pear- and gourd-shaped teapots by Stephen Rich Nelson.

It’s been sitting idle for more than two years, but Zillah’s landmark Teapot Dome gas station may not be sitting still much longer.

If city officials get their way, the 84-year-old teapot-shaped building could be moved into town, where it would be converted into a visitors center.

Rising fuel prices in March 2004 convinced owner Keith Strader to close the station that’s listed on the National Historic Register.

Now, Strader wants to sell the Teapot Dome and the two acres it’s situated on just southeast of Zillah along Yakima Valley Highway. The asking price is $125,000.

Sometimes, when an artwork seems unduly difficult or even maddeningly opaque, it’s entirely fair to ask yourself if this difficulty (whether real or only apparent) is because the work is innately and thus necessarily hard to crack, or whether it’s just badly organized or awkwardly envisaged.

Such is the case with the pieces making up this new exhibition by Toronto-based artist Marla Hlady at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects.

Hlady’s work — which is unfailingly elegant and, if you ever come to the heart of it, poignant and often mordantly amusing — is really very hard to get at without the aid of the exhibition’s various attendant and supportive texts (some by Hlady herself).