“All of the things that sustain, enrich, transform, and celebrate life can be encapsulated in the vessel.”

Twin Risers

“Twin Risers” is my most extravagantly engineered, exuberantly original piece – a teapot unlike any ever made before, not merely in superficial terms but in all aspects. It integrates opposing forces of the live and the inorganic, of stylized waterfowl and cityscape, of human torso and industrial tower. And yes, it makes tea. Everyone asks me this; once, during a family Thanksgiving, when a cousin asked me “Does it make tea?” another cousin butted in before I could reply and said, “It’s in the Smithsonian, yah jerk! Who cares?” I care — my teapots are all fully functional, and simultaneously combine aesthetic concerns, utility, engineering, craft, and history.

Whistling Swan Teapot Study (click to enlarge for detail)

Natural history, and birds especially, are vital to my work. Whistling Swan teapot is the precursor to Twin Risers. This drawing of the teapot, made beforehand to conceptualize aspects of it, explores what is to me the most important thing about metal vessels: the life of the interior, as a locus of regeneration and nurture. The drawing plays with imagery of eggs, dividing cells, and the egg-like body of the swan. Yet beyond the enclosed life of the interior is its counterpart, the dynamic cycle of nature, in which the swan swims through the circulating oceans of air and water. This dialogue, between the life of the interior and the cycles of the natural system, is central to my thinking.

Twin Risers Digital: Perspective Wireframe (click to enlarge)

Twin Risers embodies a mutual transformation: the city transformed into the bird that can navigate in water and air, and/or the bird transformed into the city that navigates through human, narrative time. The integral hinge (see more on this element, below) underlines the idea of unlike elements coming together harmoniously, yet with tensions and surprises.

Twin Risers was the first teapot that I made using digital modeling. This image provides a nice analytical perspective of the piece’s major structures. But it makes it look easy. Don’t be fooled!

People tend to overlook the fine details in artwork and in natural landscapes – usually, an artist or a naturalist has to point out those fine details that make a piece, or a creature, unlike any other, the product of unique historical processes and pressures. Living beings, of course, are the products of evolution. In artwork – like Twin Risers – the artist deliberately seeks out and solves problems, evolving the piece. Twin Risers is baroque and over-the-top in its engineering, like a bird of paradise. Below are some images of the process of making a perfect integral hinge on a dome.

“The life of the interior, in the nest, is emotionally very different from life beyond.”

Every spring and summer I photograph Coopers’ hawks on my property and in the neighborhood.. This experience has surprised me, showing me the warmth, tenderness, and cosy domestic life of one of the most ruthless raptors. The life of the interior, in the nest, is emotionally very different from life beyond. Look at the chicks snuggling up and bonding to mighty mom!

Coopers Pair (click to enlarge)

What an intense relationship between these two – you can feel it! Cooper’s dads are very involved in child (or chick) care, sometimes brooding on the unhatched eggs while the female takes a break. This proud dad sometimes shoved the female aside with his foot, to peer at the eggs beneath, as if checking on their progress.

Both birds and artworks teach you that there is always more to see and learn, more connections to discover.

Here we see the transition from the vessel, the interior, to the dynamic natural system beyond … it is a transition I explore in my tea infusers, like “Intimate Symmetry with Dog-Sucking Louse.”

Intimate Symmetry with Dog-Sucking Louse

Elegance, meet lousiness. I admit to a bit of aesthetic and historical mischief in adopting the idiom of high-Victorian elegance – the ornamental elegance of the great tea services of great houses – to present the visual themes of a plucked wishbone, a stray holly leaf that I saw every day on a driveway for some time, and a dog-sucking louse (pierced in the leaf-shaped strainer), familiar from our dogs’ mange issues. Humor aside, though, these elements remind us of nature’s dynamic system in motion, the consumption of creatures by other creatures – leaf by insect, dog by louse, tea by human, bird by predator. The web of these nonlinear relations achieves balance, like the strainer on the cup. Thus, we reflect on the limitations of the human perspective and its special insights.

Infuser on Drip Stand

This piece is in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum. Here, the reference to nature lies chiefly in the engineering. The dynamics of the moving parts, and the fit of unusual forms in cohesive, yet unexpected ways, refer to the ecosystem.

In “Birdmirror,” the iconic bird watches from atop the “mirror held up to nature,” as art was classically defined …

Birdmirror (Spoon)

“The human-made vessel is one of the most basic, ancient, and accessible artistic forms”

Here, the mother hawk supervises her half-fledged chicks, still in the nest. Let us not forget that animals taught us how to make many sorts of vessels: birds by weaving and mud-daubing nests like this very sturdy one; ants by mound-building; bees by wax-forming; butterflies by cocooning; foxes, squirrels, and many other mammals by digging dens and food-caches; and so on.

The human-made vessel is one of the most basic, ancient, and accessible artistic forms. All of the things that sustain, enrich, transform, and celebrate life can be encapsulated in the vessel: it evokes the womb, the seed, cooking and food storage, human dwellings, and the like; on a more abstract level, the vessel as artwork can address social, psychological, and ecological concerns.

Please Do Not Touch The Artwork

After ten years, I’m still working on ridding my property of honey locust trees. The forester told me to “get rid of five trees a year,” to make room for more desirable trees that aren’t armed with three to five-inch thorns as sharp as razors. One summer I just had to make a piece with the remains of these noble enemies. It took the heaviest gloves and best safety glasses I owned, sitting in the barn with a few beers and the oldies station playing on the radio.

The intimate knowledge of natural history and practical forestry supports my visible vocabulary; this symbiosis is vital to my artistic practice. This vessel stems from venerable craft traditions of metalsmithing, woodworking and textiles, establishing a link to long traditions of household use and ornament. While the vessel, generally speaking, is a metaphor for the body and life — the emphasis of the vessel is on the interior and speaks of containment, shelter, and nourishment — in this particular case, an ironic tension exists between the ordinarily inviting domestic object, the teapot, and its intimidating thorny structure. Yet insect egg cases are visible in the structure of this teapot, reminding us that the thorny honey-locust tree protects the birds and insects in its limbs. Thus, through the evocation of a familiar domestic image, we are brought to recognize that nature is a home for all creatures. ♦

Tom Muir is Distinguished Research Professor at Bowling Green State University, where he is head of the Jewelry and Metalsmithing area in the School of Art. His award-winning work has been published and exhibited extensively in art, craft and design exhibitions, in which he has received 10 best of show or first place awards. Collections include the Art Institute of Chicago, Renwick Gallery of the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution and The White House Collection of American Crafts, National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. He is the recipient of an Arts Midwest/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Artist Fellowship, Michigan Council for the Arts Fellowship, and numerous Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship Awards. In 2009, Tom received the Outstanding Achievement Award from the Ohio Designer Craftsmen for having made a major contribution to craft in Ohio. Learn more about Tom Muir on his website and visit him on facebook.