I went in for tarragon but was immediately distracted.
The Heights Garden Center [1]had shiny Vietnamese pottery on display in the sun. The pots have glazes with fantastic colors and patterns - the surfaces made me think of some of the digital works exhibited in Max Eternity's Art Digital Magazine. [2]
Besides their upbeat and joyous appearance, what is really amazing about the pots is that they are here, for sale, in NEO. And still in one piece. Getting these heavy, fragile items of commerce (not museum stuff) across one ocean and one continent is a spectacular feat.
The pots (not the fish) are sized so that three or four nest inside of each other, like Russian Dolls [3]. Look down inside a large pot and you can see little spots where the melted glaze from the pot which was fired inside of the larger pot has been snapped to remove the inside pot.
One of the Garden staff persons said that the pots arrive in an intermodal shipping container [4] - and the protective packing material between the pots is shreds of athletic shoe waste from a Nike shoe factory in Vietnam.
Overcoming the challenging physical and economic barriers to trade this art into our economy is an example to emulate.
Is it just the bright attractive colors of these objects which, even though they are nonessential, makes them attractive?
Or does our sense of their fragility and their “foreignness” also make them desirable?
These fish and pots are distributed by LeBeau [5]