Alan Miner

Hang out with long-time potters for any length of time and the subject of teapots invariably comes up. Requiring a combination of shapes and skills, making a teapot from clay is considered the pinnacle of achievement, a feat mastered by few but honored by many within the craft.

Ivy Heymann, Alan Miner and Denise Henry make their livings as potters making functional pottery in Lincoln County. Their styles differ, but all believe that teapots represent the highest level of proficiency.

“If a potter can make a good teapot consistently, he or she is worth his or her salt,” Heymann said.

Miner, a ceramics instructor at ENMU-Ruidoso for the past 11 years, works in high-fire white stoneware, fired at temperatures ranging from 2100 and 2372 degrees. The hard and dense clay result in large, substantial teapots. Miner offsets massiveness by incorporating large, looped and textured handles that sometimes include hanging embellishments like crystals.

Henry has been making teapots only for a few years and works in lower temperature stoneware, spurred on by Miner, who was her teacher. Her studio in Ruidoso, close to Miner’s own shop, features smaller, personal teapots. Some look Japanese while others reflect modern sensibilities. Born in Brasilia, Henry is influenced by the angular, clean lines of the architecture of Oscar Niemeyer, who helped design the Brazilian capital.

Heymann lives and works outside of White Oaks. She works in porcelain, a smoother clay fired at higher temperatures. The walls of her teapots are thin and her designs are delicate and dedicated to the simplicity and beauty of a perfect sphere. She mixes earth materials and metallic oxides for glazes that reflect the colors of the landscape she sees daily out the window located above her throwing wheel.

What makes the teapot such a challenge are the different shapes, including bowls, cylinders and flattened pieces, each with its own purpose and the many skills needed to make them well.

Careful examination is needed at every stage, including inception. Thinking out the process before any manual work has its roots in pottery’s earliest history. One theory of the teapot’s origin holds that the form evolved from Chinese wine vessels in the Yixing region. Beginning in 1510, development of teapots exploded in the region, largely due to its abundance of stoneware clay. Early teapots were carved out of a solid block, then thrown on a wheel and then, later in that century, cast in molds, but potters did not work alone. Intellectuals and writers were involved in the process, inscribing poems as decoration and working out desirable proportions. The inclusion of critique pushed potters and elevated the craft into art. The unintended consequences were an efficient piece of functional ware as well as a means of artistic expression. It is a seemingly incongruous combination that exists today.

Denise Henry

“Every step had a question—what, where, when, why and how,” Heymann explained in describing how she approaches making a teapot. “You have to decide what size you want, what volume, what form, character and style.”

For Heymann, style manifests attitude, including whether the pot will embody a feminine look versus a strong, uplifted or abstracted form.
Once an idea is formulated, the working process takes about a week and begins with a slab of clay. All the pieces must be made at the same time.

The spout, the lid and the main body are thrown on a wheel.

The body needs to keep the water hot but not adversely affect the taste or aroma of the tea being brewed. It is usually the first step of the process.

“I like spheres,” Heymann said. “It is a beautiful form all by itself and once you put a handle on it, you can hold the teapot from any point and pour.”
Strainer holes must also be included. They must be large enough so they do not clog with glaze later on, but small enough to catch loose tea leaves.

“You need to put holes in the body from the outside where you want the spout to go,” Heymann said. “I forgot to do that on one pot…it is the type of mistake you do only once.”

The spout must allow water to pour smoothly without shooting hot water out or dripping when the pot is sat back down. Its height must be level with the rim of the body and its angle must keep water from running out when not being poured.

“I cut the spout at a 45 degree angle and then carve a small groove inside the top to slow the water down,” Heymann said. “If you cut the spout level, the torque of throwing means that the clay, which has a memory and wants to return to its original state, has a tendency to twist back when it is fired,” Miner added.

“I include a belly at the bottom of the spout, a secondary chamber,” Miner said. “I also make my spout openings a little bit bigger so the tea flows better.”

The lid must be measured exactly, typically using calipers, with some type of counterweight or flange that extends inside the body so it fits snugly and stays put even at extreme pouring angles.

A breather hole is made either in the body of the pot or in the lid, again to make pouring easier.

“It helps the flow,” Miner said. “If sealed completely, a pot will glug. It needs air to break the vacuum.”

Once the clay is hard enough, the lid is turned upside down and trimmed to fit more precisely to the body.

Heymann makes a couple of lids, since, if a lid breaks after the first firing in a kiln, it cannot be re-made. Any attempt will simply not fit correctly.
The handle is either extruded through a machine that presses the clay through a die, much like a pasta maker or pulled by hand. It needs to be strong enough to hold the weight of the pot and water that fills it but curved far enough from the body so as not to burn knuckles. In addition, its placement, if coming up and around from the body cannot interfere with pouring water into the teapot. If the handle is located on one side, it must aesthetically balance out the spout and not put too much stress on the wrist.
Theories of ergonomics often have a personal bias.

“Since I have a weak thumb, I sometimes put a tab on top of a handle to make holding the teapot easier,” Heymann said.

All the pieces are then covered in plastic so they dry slowly and shrink at the same rate. Once the clay is leather hard and the body and lid trimmed and cleaned up, the pieces are ready to be put together.

The handle and spout must be attached to the body firmly but not so forcefully as to distort the body.

In the end, the weights of the separate parts must offset one another so that the vessel will not topple over either sideways or fore and aft when set down. Function and design must be integrated with an aesthetic that includes balance of the individual parts as well as the whole. The pieces should flow into one another. In other words, is should be pretty.

The pot is then set aside to totally dry before being fired in the kiln.

As a last step before firing, Miner uses a pin tool to write a saying on the bottom of his pots and smudges a small piece of clay onto the pot as a signature as homage to the form’s earliest creators.

Henry learned first hand what happens when the clay does not dry out, as in this past humid and rainy summer.

“The clay was too wet and it exploded in the kiln,” Henry said. “It wrecked a number of other pieces too.”

Miner experienced a similar explosion in the glaze firing, but rather than it destroying a pot, a piece of flying brick merely resulted in a rough addition to the body.

“There is something Zen-like in accepting the flaw,” he said. “It certainly makes it unique.”

The flaw occurred in the second firing of the pot after glaze is applied. Again, much handling of the pot occurs in this stage as the pot is either painted or dipped into glaze.

“I submerge the whole form into the glaze and then hand dip the handle again,” Heymann said. “Using tongs, it is hard to get all the glaze out of the body before it is too thick, making it heavy.”

Even with the utmost care, Heymann, Miner and Henry admit to a 20 to 30 percent failure rate.

“You need to concentrate so hard,” Henry said, holding up a teapot with a broken spout. “I was so sad to see this.”

“Making a good teapot is a really long and thoughtful process,” Heymann said. “Making a soup tureen with all of its la, la, la isn’t anything like making a teapot.”