For more than four decades, Richard Notkin has created extraordinary ceramics whose narrative content reflects larger conversations taking place in the world. In the early 1980s, he became fascinated by the pottery of the Yixing kilns in China. Potters in Yixing (in the Yangzi River delta area) used naturally colored stoneware clays to carve, sculpt, and slip-cast vessels. Notkin was intrigued by the exacting detail of the pieces and began to refer to it in a series of teapots that combine the traditions of Chinese Yixing pottery with the artist’s social consciousness.

Notokin's Yixing teapots are small in scale but loaded with potent messages that are often critical of humanity’s failings. The artist frequently uses the human skull as a symbol of death as well as of human intellect. In the Cube Skull Teapot series, he combines the skull with imagery that explores the causes and effects of war.