Deep Serving Dishes

When I’m looking at books about pottery, I’ll often go to the back of the book, where you can find a catalog description of all the illustrations or plates. Those descriptions hold some potent information, perhaps more than the images or illustrations. One time I came across the description of a “deep cup-like serving vessel” where a “tiny tidbit of food would be found when the diner peered into the vessel”. It was those words, not the actual pot it was describing that got my attention. I set out to make a pot according to that description alone—I was thinking about the experience of someone peering into something - how would someone peer into a vessel? what shape? How deep? How could light get down at the bottom?

I began by making a series of thrown and slab built vessels. These are now in a private collection. Others have come since - one is now in the collection of the New Taipei City Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan.