A little avant-garde teapot

For 26-year-old Serina Nakazawa, the best part of creating ceramics is the element of surprise.

After forming a piece of pottery out of clay and decorating and glazing it, the color and appearance of the object can change dramatically after it is heated in a kiln, Nakazawa explained.

It’s sort of like opening a gift that’s a total surprise.

“Until I open the box, I never know what’s inside,” she said.

Ceramics proved surprising to Nakazawa in another way recently, when she found out in late February that she’d won the grand prize in the Third International Small Teapot Competition at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. Her award is a 16-day trip to China, where she will learn about Chinese ceramics. The trip begins May 28.

Nakazawa moved to Southern California from her native Japan in 2005 to study English and ceramics. She majored in art in college, and taught art to junior high school students. But she had scarcely dabbled in ceramics, and it was something she wanted to try.

Since 2005, she’s taken at least 10 ceramics classes at Glendale Community College — sometimes repeating the same class more than once — and spent hours practicing the craft at the college’s ceramics studio.

More than 80 artists from 10 countries and a number of states around the U.S. entered the competition, Nakazawa said.

Nakazawa submitted a trio of teapots that she dubbed the “Tea Amigos.” Each of the three teapots is a different size, and each teapot is made of several circular pieces of clay that were made individually. Nakazawa made the body of each teapot by hand. The two legs and handle of the teapot are circular, and were crafted using a pottery wheel. The teapot’s spout, a cylinder, was also made with a wheel.

A teapot is a complicated ceramic object to create because the different components must fit together in good proportion to one another, said Mark Poore, who is the head of the ceramics department at Glendale Community College and has taught Nakazawa there.

“It’s a tough form to make,” he said.

Nakazawa’s work on the teapots began last spring, when she was given an assignment in an earthenware ceramics class at the college to create a ceramics object that emphasized a geometric shape.

In all, it took Nakazawa about six months to create the teapots that won the competition. Some of the first versions of the teapots broke in her room after falling from a chair. Needing to re-create them meant that the second versions were more precise than the first, she said.

The inspiration behind the decorative patterns on the teapots came from her room, which is adorned with bright colors and circular wall hangings.

Each of the three teapots are decorated similarly, with concentric circles of alternating colors on one side, circles made of tiny dots of paints on the other side, and black and white stripes on the top.

Painting the thin rings of circles along one side of the teapot was the most painstaking part of the process, Nakazawa said. Each ring needed several coats of paint to achieve an opaque look.

The end result is a set of teapots that are incredibly neat while being unique and untraditional, Poore said.

“Her work is very clean,” he continued. “She really pays attention to detail.”

Nakazawa said she would like to continue creating ceramics while doing other kinds of work, like teaching art, either in Japan or in the U.S.