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Strange brew

Craig Bachman's teapots are more than short and stout

by Leon Nigrosh

CRAIG BACHMAN: WORKS IN CLAY At the Mazmanian Art Gallery, Framingham State College, Framingham, through November 14.

Ever since the Ming dynasty, the teapot has been held up as the ultimate example of a potter's skill. The ability to make a spout, body, cover, and handle come together in an aesthetically pleasing (and dripless) vessel is used even today to measure whether a journeyman clayworker is ready to become a master potter.

What then are we to make of Craig Bachman's teapots? He builds clay logs with gnarly handles and attaches twisted spouts to bent two-by-fours rendered in clay. Certainly these objects cannot be deemed as functional, yet this is exactly the way that Bachman views his work. Well-schooled in the ceramic arts, he holds two degrees, has worked with Paul Soldner and Peter Voulkos, and currently teaches ceramics at Framingham State. It is obvious that he knows what he calls "the game of function" quite well, and it is through this recent work that he gets a chance to play games with the game.

Bachman begins with the idea of the teapot and its ability to hold and dispense liquid in a pleasing and practical manner, and uses this as a vehicle to "jump off into sculpture." Viewed in this light -- as artistic compositions developed from disparate elements, his teapots fulfill an important aesthetic function, if not a utilitarian one.

His Teapot 1 appears to be a large, U-shaped section of a wooden two-by-four adorned with segments of gnarled branch. After the first question, "Does it work?'' goes unanswered, other questions immediately arise. If this is made of slipcast pieces (it is), how did he reproduce a branch tied into a knot? How did he get the piece of wood to bend almost in half? And, does it work? The questions quickly fade as we begin to admire how the twig handle echoes the graceful curve of the base that is gently balanced on its ends. We see how the knotted spout repeats and reinforces the handle theme, and how the cover's knob breaks up the negative space surrounding it. Whether it actually pours or not becomes less important than whether Bachman has captured the essence of his subject.

Drawn from the Chinese Yixing pottery tradition of making teapots based upon natural objects, other teapots appear to have been assembled from bits of wood cobbled together in squarish shapes. These pots again teeter on the edge of having both a utilitarian use and a purely aesthetic one. Surprisingly, this small grouping of box-like pots, with their enhanced wood-grain textures, can be used to store and pour tea -- but would you really want to?

Bachman's latest teapot represents a departure from the slipcast trompe l'oeil direction he'd been working in for the past six years. This small, black gem is decorated with myriad lines of raised dots and hand built from flat sheets of clay that arch into a haughty curve -- and it's actually meant to be used.

In sharp contrast to his angular, twisting, and detailed teapot sculptures, a group of large platters punctuates the gallery walls. Acting as a foil for the complex technical forays with molds, clay slip, joinery, and all the other concerns involved in producing his teapots, Bachman turns to these platters for relaxation.

Each two-foot-diameter plate is first fired with just a black glaze. Bachman considers these as his canvases, starting points for various explorations in positive and negative space on a two-dimensional plane. One series consists simply of squares of white glaze re-fired onto the black background. But each of the platters presents us with a different set of textures, different sizes of square, and different intensities of illumination. All of these effects come about after the "breaking white" glaze is applied, and he sits back and "lets the kiln take over.''

In many cases, Bachman is as surprised and gratified with the results as we are. In one platter the white glaze seems to have shrunk in on itself, leaving a ghostlike aura surrounding it. And Plate 3 in particular, with its crackled white surface on the lower portion of the platter, has the visage of a mystical landscape. This effect is heightened by the fortuitous appearance of several small areas of ruckling, which suggest distant clouds.

Whenever Bachman gets too involved with his teapots, he turns to his platters to play. In this show we get to see both sides of the artist.

The Mazmanian Gallery is open Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday from 7 to 9 p.m., and by appointment. Call 626-4801.