Artist pours her
time and talent into tiny pots

The detailed designs for each stack of pots takes 40 hours to execute.

The Corpus Christi ceramicist takes teapots to an art form, celebrating their round-bodied beauty in a series of stacked miniatures that fascinate the eye with a rhythmic surface design.

Her nonfunctional pottery, sold in galleries nationwide, is bought by people who pour $150 to $15,000 into pieces for their teapot collections.

The popularity of teapot collecting is fueled, in part, by the comeback of the beverage. The social excesses of the 1980s had people switch from "happy hour" to "tea time," according to the summer issue of Tea: A Magazine, which features Busch's ceramics on the cover.

As teapots grew more popular as collectors' items, artists became more drawn to the form, which invites variety and unity in creating the functional parts, said Leslie Ferrin. Her gallery in Northampton, Mass., carries Busch's ceramics among the teapots of 200 American artists. Ferrin has a mailing list of 500 collectors and knows of 400 artists who are creating artistic teapots. Busch's teapots are a popular seller in her gallery. She is the only artist Ferrin knows of who stacks teapots works in such an intimate scale.

"Gail's teapots are beautifully proportioned and elegant in design and surface treatment," said Ferrin, who lectures and curates invitational teapot shows throughout the country. "Gail unites all those aspects, the handle, the spout, the body and the surface. Her whole concept of the miniatures echo throughout the piece. They're just gorgeous."

The detailed design work and sculpting that goes into making sets of stacked teapots takes 40 hours, Busch said. She works in her home near Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, where her husband Louis Katz teaches ceramics. The couple moved here from Montana 18 months ago.

Her pots that top the stacks are the size of a thumbnail; the lid knobs no bigger than a poppy seed. The spouts are as narrow as a vermicelli noodle. Her base pots range from five to 10 inches in height. Each pot is attached to the other by a flange.

"Most potters don't work with anything that small. It's fastidious, painstaking work," said Busch, who made her first stacked piece in 1985.

Her teapot designs seem similar but a closer look shows the patterns are subtly varied as the fans in a scallop shell. When she became pregnant a year ago with her first child, Sam, she noticed her pieces became riper and rounder.

"My forms vary from piece to piece the way things in nature do," said the 37-year-old potter.

The elegant simplicity of her painted designs is created by adding layers of glazing and bands of a liquid clay called terra sigellatas between kiln firings. She favors earthy hues like spruce green, grayish blues, pale yellows and terra cotta.

Busch said she draws her surface inspiration from forms in nature and from pots of ancient and primitive cultures. "Something that is a constant in my work is dividing things vertically like the lobes of pumpkins and oranges. And if you are going up and down, you might as well go sideways."

The patterns on her pots create an illusion of fullness. As her stacks have become smaller, the pots have flattened in width, she said.

Busch grew up in Bucks County, Pa., the daughter of a computer designer. She said she inherited her father's fascination with taking things apart and putting them back together again. But always knew she would be an artist. "I was always making things and drawing things."

Busch earned an undergraduate degree at Kansas City Art Institute, one of the country's foremost schools for ceramicists. She received her masters in fine arts at Montana State University and taught ceramics at New Mexico State University and at the University of Missouri at Columbia. She met her husband in undergraduate school and together they traveled to Thailand in 1988, where he documented Thai folk pottery on a Fulbright grant.

"Everything is decorated in Thailand from temples to taxis," said Busch, whose work became more complex when she returned from East Asia.

"When we came back from Thailand, Gail's work became more organic," said Katz, who photographs his wife's pottery for galleries and publications. "The color schemes became more complicated and subtle at the same time."

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