Spartanburg artist Jim Weber’s traditional and functional pottery has remained his mainstay throughout his 53 years as a potter, but today, his repertoire includes unique lidded teapots and jars. His works will be on display in the exhibit “Pottery with a Twist” set for May 6 through 31 in Gallery III of the Artists Collective | Spartanburg.
An artist’s reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. Thursday, May 15, as part of Spartanburg ArtWalk. The reception and exhibition viewing are free and open to the public. Weber will give an artist’s talk and a potter’s wheel demonstration from 6 to 7 p.m.
Most of the pottery Weber has made through the years has been “of a functional, even traditional range of forms,” he says. “They were the first types of pottery I ever saw as a young child and eventually became the sort of pieces I wanted to make when I got the chance.”
That “chance” came when his parents offered him a pottery class for his 13th birthday, and he continued those classes regularly for the next couple of years.
At 15, “fortune” struck again, Weber says, when a fine arts high school opened in his county-wide school system in Greenville, South Carolina. The Greenville County Fine Arts Center came “just in time” to give a “centering theme to my life,” he says, adding that he participated in the 50th anniversary alumni exhibit there in April.
The exhibition at the Artists Collective “has much of the same type work I’ve done for years, but for the first time I will feature several lidded pieces that will have lids that I’ve designed to ‘twist’ on and off,” Weber says.
He explains that lids for such things as urns or jars typically are secured with a high-temperature wax, “such as a letter may be sealed with.” A customer, though requested a funerary urn with a lid “screw-on” lid. At first Weber explained he couldn’t make such an urn.
“I couldn’t quit thinking about it,” he says, and he began to work on making one. “That first urn with my ‘twist-lid’ was almost a disaster several times.”
The final product only fit in one position, but he perfected the technique and now makes ones that go on and off more easily.
“I had to make tools that helped to make my work more symmetrical,” Weber says, noting the “cheap coat hanger wire,” a sheet of “thin cork” and a “couple of drill bits” from his tool box as instrumental in the production of the 150+ twist-lidded pots he’s made since. “Most of them teapots,” he adds. “You can practically invert the teapot and the lid will never fall off and break. It doesn’t actually screw on. There’s more of a slight twist as you lift the lid, or settle it back in place.”
Weber says it is quite simple, and he was amazed to find from multiple ceramics professors that they’d never seen the design. “Lidded vessels go back thousands of years, and I knew a half dozen ways to help secure a lid to its vessel,” but it appears that no one before him ever did it the way he does.
Weber’s exhibition will include “as many teapots and jars as I can get made” along with “an assortment of my ‘regular’ pots.”