Duality

I made this teapot alongside an assignment I gave my students about duality. The idea was pretty simple: make a functional teapot that communicates two opposing ideas at the same time. Once I started thinking about what that meant for my own work, it became a lot less simple.

A lot of what I’ve been making lately deals with stability. Pallets, crates, bricks, sawhorses, straps, scaffolding, objects that support things, move things, hold weight, or keep something from falling apart. I’ve been interested in the strange visual language of these objects and how easily something can look unstable while actually being carefully supported.

That felt like the right place to start.

I built the teapot as a small brick structure sitting on a shipping pallet. The lid became a utility cover. The spout feels almost like a piece of infrastructure sticking out of the side of the building. Everything about it is meant to look heavy, permanent, industrial, and slightly beat up. But it’s a teapot. It’s hollow. It’s ceramic. It’s fragile. That contradiction became the part I liked most.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between instability and rebuilding. From the outside, those two things can look remarkably similar. Something gets dismantled. Something moves. The structure that existed before isn’t there anymore. It’s easy to look at that moment and only see what was lost. But sometimes taking something apart is how you build a better foundation.

The pallet became especially important to me for that reason. It suggests that the structure isn’t necessarily abandoned. It’s in transit. It has been moved from one place and hasn’t completely arrived at the next one yet. Maybe that’s the duality in this piece. Displaced, but supported. Fragile, but heavy. Unstable, but being rebuilt. I started this because I wanted to make the same assignment I was asking my students to make. I didn’t expect it to fit so naturally into the work I’ve already been making.

I’m really happy that it does.