Teapot

Teapot
A National Juried Exhibition
Opening Reception | Friday, September 9, 2019 | 5:00 – 7:00 p.m.
Exhibition on view through October 6, 2017

The Jane Hartsook Gallery is pleased to present Teapot, A National Juried Exhibition with works selected by juror, John Neely. Neely’s selections demonstrate the plethora of inventive approaches to creating a teapot and the object’s adaptable nature, inviting the most eccentric or subtle changes to form. The teapot, a device designed for brewing and serving tea serves as a sacred participant in the Japanese tea ceremony and a symbolic element for Victorian era upper class society. It is also an object of fetishism, expression and iconography, a truly versatile object. When covered with extravagant embellishments, it is highly collectible kitsch or a political statement or both. The maker can imbue the teapot with a narrative that adds context to the form as a means of communication. Artists in this exhibition expand our experience of a teapot’s function and the possibility of surprise through elaborate and decorative deviation.

Creating a teapot often requires attention to how the object moves or is handled during use, engaging a curiosity for how to adapt construction and invention. The works in this exhibition are a result of those skills, trial and error, experimentation and tenacity. For utilitarian teapots, this might pertain to how the belly of the form contains tea or how it transitions through and out of the spout. For non/semi-functional teapots, movement is emphasized more through design, textural curiosity and/or conceptual fascination. As a result, artists see to fruition teapots with wood-fired surfaces, representations of nature, decorative pattern-making and
implications of humor.

Exhibiting artists include Posey Bacopoulos, Hayne Bayless, Jim Budde, Todd Burns, Mary Elizabeth Cotterman, Scott Dooley, Christopher Drobnock, Stephen Heywood, Steve Hilton, Jamie Kirkpatrick, Chris Pickett, Louis Reilly, Taylor Robenalt, Meryl Ruth, Josh Scott, Nathan Willever, Tripti Yoganathan and Dan Zulawski. Featured image is courtesy of Chris Pickett.

John Neely is the Professor of Ceramics at Utah State University and is an accomplished ceramicist having presented his work in over 100 domestic group exhibitions as well as solo and international exhibitions which include China, Korea, Australia, Japan, New Zealand and Yugoslavia. John has lectured and conducted workshops at the International Woodfire Conference in Flagstaff, AZ; Functional Ceramics Workshop in Wooster, OH; Utilitarian Clay Conference in Arrowmont, TN; Mendocino Arts Center in Mendocino, CA, and the Experimental Porcelain Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. He will provide a one-day workshop in conjunction with Teapot on Friday, September 8, 2017 at Greenwich House Pottery, New York, NY.