Checkered Vessel

The form of the teapot is, as the chair is for the designer or the pavilion for the architect, a site of experimentation for clay artists, and comparing teapots made by different artists is an interesting way to allow Museum visitors to understand moments of convergence and divergence in experimentation in one particular medium. Leslie Thompson’s practice was cemented in a class on Native American pottery where she determined her interest in surface designs on clay. Her bulbous ceramic forms are decorated with crisp geometrical patterns that play against one another and are based upon the work of M.C. Escher and artists of the Op-Art movement. Her pots are made by coating a high-fire porcelain vessel with black slip, then carving through the black, back to the original white surface while the clay is still soft.