More Inside:

`The Long Way Home'
And Other Documentaries

Touched By An Angel

Enchanting Illuminations

SUZANNE CHESSLER

Special to The Jewish News

C:

Brewing life in porcelain.

eramic sculptor Iry Tepper
forms new cups and teapots
- that look ages old and
worn, as if they are about
to disintegrate. He thinks of them as
symbols — ways to express negative
emotions shown during heated con-
versations over coffee or tea.
Tepper works with porcelain
because it allows light to pass
through and give. the illusion of a life
force that continues through. fragile
times. When light hits his small
sculptural forms at the right angle,
they seem to glow.
Tepper's most recent examples, on
exhibit through April 18 at the Sybaris
Gallery in Royal Oak, bring forth
images that suggest a loss of control or
a frozen moment of destruction.
"The cups and teapots take on the
emotions of people," said the artist,
51, who has not exhibited in Michi-
gan before but has traveled to the
University of Michigan to meet with a
visiting ceramist from Japan. "Like
people, [these objects] wear down and
show their real character." The new
teapots also are influenced by the pas-
tel colors and boomerang shape that
typified the 1960s lounge look.
Tepper, who started this series in
1976, had no intention of brewing it
for so long, but somehow the interest
remained and pieces were added peri-
odically to expand the subject and
the sentiments.
Always dysfunctional, the table-
ware remnants emphasize the impact
of dysfunctional relationships.
"My work has to do with things
under stress and in decline,"
explained Tepper, who stretches his
material so thin that the cups and
serving pieces break under their own
weight. 'All my work has a lot to do
with feelings."
Before actually forming the cups
and teapots, Tepper experimented
with drawings and wrote down con-
versations that he hoped to represent
artistically. Wanting his sculptural
forms to suggest emotions over time,
he thought of ways they might
appear after going through thousands
TEPPER-WARE on page 80