Hare Basket, Ken Ferguson

Archive Label 2003: Ken Ferguson is internationally known for his overtly physical and elastic slump jars, teapots and baskets, as well as peeling, bubbling, and crawling layers of dry glaze that highlight key parts of their surfaces. Beginning in 1964 and for the following 30 years, he taught aspiring ceramists at the Kansas City Art Institute. He encouraged those studying with him to push their clay forms to the limits of near collapse in exploration of their creative impulses, all the while making the same exploration with his own work. 1985 marks the first time Ferguson used a rabbit shape, now synonymous with his work, as an element of a basket. The rabbit’s arching form as it springs from a motionless state appealed to him as a solution to his search for a vigorous and graceful basket handle. From there, he continued to use rabbit forms for handles and inventively used them as tripod legs for baskets (as in the hare basket here), loopy handles for teapots and other vessels, and parts of basket rims. The source for the rabbit might be a lead-glazed slipware dish decorated with a hare that Ferguson first saw in the Burnap Collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. It could be Wyoming jackrabbits that he has observed for many years, or eastern rabbits that he hunted with his father. Or, it could come from Aesop’s fable. Ferguson likes this ambiguity.