Teabowls

Derek Emms (Very Early) Tea Bowl..

Jack Doherty - Soda Fired Tea Bowl

Chris Carter - Lava Tea Bowl

Jean-Pierre Chollet - Many Beautiful Things going on in this Tea Bowl...

Peter Black - Twisting Yunomi - Another Find from Clay College

Wonderful A few more names on my wish list.

Buncheong ware sake bowl by Hajeong Lee

Very impressed by Katherine Kingdon’s work. Via Oxford Ceramics Fair

Karen Bunting, carved and combed guinomi

Andrew Mason

Katherine Kingdon is fun. Did not know that RF did porcelain.

Please forgive my naivety but looking through this thread it seems that teabowls come in all shapes and sizes, so what differentiates a teabowl from, say, a rice bowl? Most of the pieces shown here I wouldn't hesitate to identify as teabowls, but certainly not all of them. The Mason bowl above, for example, is one that I would never have thought is a teabowl. Would it be too simplistic to assume that it's the foot that makes the bowl a teabowl?

Lol, we’re not purists. Some of the bowls are summer chawans but double as noodle or cereal bowls etc. And there are a lot of Western Studio potters who have taken the form into a whole new genre of non-oriental tea bowls. Some might label them as beakers, whiskey sippers, etc. I’m not going to argue with anyone else’s classifications. It’s just collecting for fun and I put mine on here to keep track of them.

In my opinion there are a vast amount of bandwagon tea bowl potters out there. If there is a demand then people will fill  that demand. No one want posy rings any more.

I think Naomi originally posted this a year or two ago




[N - you can delete this post if needed in the future]

Martin Harman, his student work via eBay

22 Crawford St. wrote:In my opinion there are a vast amount of bandwagon tea bowl potters out there. If there is a demand then people will fill  that demand. No one want posy rings any more.

I think things have changed, from a tea-bowl in all it's forms, as a functional piece, to being a form that potters can just go mad with,
and do almost anything they want. Naomi's fantastic examples show how these small and collectable bowls are now going towards
becoming the potter's signature pieces. in the Japanese tradition.

I have a few, but will always look for more.

If modern studio pottery teabowls have little or no merit then how come it’s a bandwagon? Collectors are told they are not true teabowls; they are a bastardisation of the Japanese form, and yet they are still keenly sought, and this demand inevitably fuels the price.
As Denby says, it’s because they have become the potters’ signature pieces; often one-off pieces rather than the potters’ standard ware. They are mini art forms in their own right.

Well I an sum it up. You are not a decent potter if you offer a teabowl. I still say they are a fashion that will come and go = Bandwagon

After all it's just a lump of heated clay. There is nothing intrinsically special about this form, only the connotations we bring from the past. Fashion comes and goes.

I'm sure the queen still drinks her morning cuppa from a Sports Direct mug.

Many well respected potters from Bernard Leach to Warren Mackenzie to Lisa Hammond made/make tea bowls.

if a pot has a pleasing form and glaze then who cares if it's a tea bowl or vase?

Well my point is that toilet roll holders, colanders and posy rings probably won't sell as well now as a your Teabowl/Chawan/Yunomi etc . They are de rigueur. There are plenty of potters out there making things about the right shape and size and selling them as 'teabowls'.

But that’s part of their charm. They’re not standard ware or utilitarian ware. They’re art objects in their own right, and many are one offs.

the earliest japanese tea bowls used in the tea ceremony were apparently recycled rice bowls from Korea

Chawan or noodle bowl. Unmarked. Probably Korean based on the messier decoration on an otherwise well thrown bowl but lacks the little circles of sand in the centre where they placed the next pot when piling them up in the kiln.
Edited to say, came acros another one recently, described as Karatsu ware so probably Japanese

Small ~18thC Chinese tea bowl or dipping bowl