Peri Teapot

Peri Teapot is a self portrait of sorts about aging and going through life changes. It is coil built, carved and paddled, then layered with colored slips over multiple firings to build up the surface and create texture. My formal art training began with figure drawing. I immediately fell in love with gesture studies. They are about line and immediacy; the quick precise motion of your hand honing in, finding the nuances that make your drawing look like the person being drawn. When it's right, the whole drawing comes alive. I bring that sensibility to my clay work, beginning with a quick gesture in clay. Slowly, the gesture is refined, paying particular attention to subtleties that animate the piece and reveal character, like the hand on a hip or tilt of the chin. My teapot series is my purely sculptural take on the teapot in ceramics and it's rich history. When I build these pieces, I like to think about the metaphor that tea steeping in a teapot is like a person and their emotions.