Turtle Vase

Philadelphia-based ceramics artist George Johnson is celebrated for his whimsical, narrative vessels that animate functional forms with playful characters and imaginative scenarios. In Turtle Vase, a funnel-shaped vessel is sandwiched between two turtles placed perpendicular to each other, supported by a pedestal adorned with a slithering serpent. The result seems to invert the notion of “turtles all the way down”—that expression of infinite regress—by reaching upward in its precarious stack. Johnson’s ceramics are held in the collections of Woodmere and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

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