Pink Pentagonal-Cross-Section Reassembled Ring Teapot

This is the first Reassembled Ring Teapot I made that I did not add animal figures to after completion. I started my Teapot series by making Upright Ring Teapots, and adding mother animal figures inside the ring and baby animals of the same species perched on the lid. See my “Madagascar Chameleons Upright Ring Teapot” and “African Elephants Upright Ring Teapot” in this Private Collections section. I then started to cut apart and reassemble the wheel-thrown rings, such as my “Pacific Puffins (Spring Plumage) Reassembled Ring Teapot” and “North American Mountain Goats Reassembled Ring Teapot.” This Pink Pentagonal-Cross-section Reassembled Ring Teapot took me eight months to complete because of other work obligations. Between times I worked on it I securely swaddled it in dry-cleaner plastic, periodically unwrapping and misting it with a water spray to keep it damp enough to continue working on it. After adding the handle and spout to the completed Reassembled Ring mounted on its natural rocky-looking base, I tried several different finial knobs on the lid. Nothing worked until I made the long twisted curving spiral lid finial you see on the finished Teapot. It bothered me, but I finally decided that a disturbing element that does not visually come to rest added life to this Teapot sculpture, so I kept it. I painted our dark green glaze on all the edges, then dipped the Teapot in our pink glaze. For some chemical-reaction reason, the copper in the green glaze eats through and neutralizes the pink glaze, and the green glaze color highlighted all the Teapot edges. I added yellow and blue glaze to the lid finial for extra contrast. For my first, abstract no-animal-figures Teapot, this one was quite a success! I rushed the Teapot to my photographer friend Jon Barber’s studio, and he took the slide images that I submitted with only days to spare to the very selective “Ceramics Monthly International Competition.” I was very pleased to receive the letter saying that it was accepted for the exhibition.

The "Ceramics Monthly International Competition " was an exhibition sponsored by Ceramics Monthly magazine of 112 fired clay artworks selected from 1549 entries submitted by clay artists from 45 countries around the world.

The jurors for this competition were Michio Sugiyama, coordinator of the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shigaraki Japan; Jimmy Clark, executive director of the Clay Studio, Philadelphia, PA; and Anita Besson, owner of Galerie Besson, London, England.

The "Ceramics Monthly International Competition" was on exhibit March 15-21, 1999 at the Columbus Convention Center, Columbus, Ohio, in conjunction with the annual Spring conference of the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA).

In the summer of 2001 Paul Park submitted an article, including several slide images, to Ceramics Monthly magazine, “The Evolution Of an Idea: Ray Bub’s Reassembled Ring Teapots,” that you can find in the Articles Section of this web site. The CM editors chose an image of this Pink Pentagonal-Cross-Section Reassembled Ring Teapot for the March 2002 cover photo of the Ceramics Monthly edition in which Paul’s article was published. Subsequently China Ceramics Illustrated translated Paul’s article into Chinese and published it in their ____ edition. This Chinese Ceramics Illustrated article can also be found in the Articles Section.

15” Tall x 9” Wide x 4” Deep
Cone 5 oxidation Firing
This Teapot was purchased for a private collection in New York, New York.