Medium:  Hand-formed clay, reed handle covered with actual camel’s hair

Dimensions:  9” h x 13” w x 8” d

Price:  Sold

Description:  I tasked my sculpture students with creating a form that used each of the clay  hand-building techniques we’d explored in class. It was important to keep the piece aesthetically integrated and visually interesting. Among the examples I shared with them was my functional camel teapot that incorporated a pinch pot (the camel’s body), coil techniques (the lid), slab construction (neck, saddle, tail and legs), hand modeling (the head and other refinements) and extruding (mane and hump tassel). 
Having attached a curved inverted “U” reed handle to the lugs (part of the saddle), it still needed more in the “interesting” requirement. My son’s friend who worked at a major zoo gave one of his camels a “tail trim” that yielded actual camel’s hair to wrap around my teapot’s ordinary reed handle. It compromised the functionality a bit but made the piece far more interesting.