Peter Pincus Produced 149 Unique, Complementary Ceramic Vessels for Glenmorangie 50 Years Old

With an ambitious concept, scope, and scale that surpasses so many other artistic spirits collaborations, American ceramic artist Peter Pincus’ Together in Spirit is both 149 unique, complementary vessels (each housing a bottle of Glenmorangie 50 Years Old) and one combined, kaleidoscopic masterwork. Developed over 1,000 days, the tessellated stretch of art required Peter and his wife Laurie to invent new ceramic techniques, blend 50 custom pigments (then applied by hand), and cast and sand each piece. The colors hark back to Pincus’ interpretation of the whisky’s tasting notes. The liquid—the oldest-ever single malt Scotch whisky to be bottled from the Highland distillery—is itself worthy of such a sprawling visual achievement.

In spring 2023, Rochester-based Peter received a request for a proposal regarding an artistic collaboration to accompany the release of Glenmorangie 50 Years Old. A whisky enthusiast, thanks to Laurie’s father, Peter felt an immediate connection. “I was very familiar with Glenmorangie leading into this,” he tells Surface. “When I found out this project was a possibility, I almost fell off my chair.” Peter and Laurie began with research into previous collaborations of this calibre. They ascertained that rarely was the whisky community represented.

“It was an almost instant idea to make visible the community,” Peter says. “I made a sketch on a napkin. Laurie said, ‘Don’t show them that. We can’t make it.’ We had never made a grid where everything lines up. But, at the end of a meeting with a group of people I said, ‘I have this thing I’d like to show you.’” He presented it to them, and the concept was greenlit.

For the Pincus studio, producing Together in Spirit was as much a math problem to solve as it was an artistic process to pursue. “We first designed it digitally,” Laurie explains. “We’d never done that before so we partnered with friends from RIT. Once we landed on what the line design would be like, they set us up with the ability to change the colors line by line so that we could figure out the order of the 50 hues.” Finally, a file was templatized into individual pieces (upside down, reversed, and 14 percent larger) with exact line marks to cut and color.

“Two days each week we would do the color work with our teammates,” Laurie continues. “We were also sanding. We were firing pieces. We were doing quality control. As we got pieces built up, we had to start figuring out what to do with them next—from gluing to metal.” Seven or eight steps were always underway simultaneously as they were parceling out tasks based on skill sets and honing efficiency.

Together in Spirit is a work of both art and collectible design. Peter readily reflects on the relationship between the two. “First and foremost, what we believe we are making is pottery,” he says. “This comes from a history that I have that goes back to me being 16 and finding it, falling in love with it, and building my life around it. I believe in utilitarian objects historically in a much larger sense than I believe in almost anything else. They’ve been here longer than all people and they will be here longer than us. There’s something really engaging about being a part of that. What we have tried to do is push it to the furthest level of what one might call a utilitarian object.”

Early on in the process, Peter and Laurie were invited to Glenmorangie House in the Scottish Highlands. There, they tried Glenmorangie 50 Years Old. “That, along with the tasting notes and aromas from Dr. Bill Lumsden MBE [Director of Distilling, Whisky Creation & Whisky Stocks at The Glenmorangie Company], gave us a launching place for color,” Laurie says. “We had never been tasked with translating tastes and smells into colors before.” They cobbled together a palette, then ordered stains and forged hundreds of test tiles. Aligning the colors of the digital image with the porcelain was one of the project’s largest feats.

Peter and Laurie pushed the boundaries of sculpture and design. In fact, the conceptual nuance lies in the very title. Together in Spirit acknowledges that all of these bottles are part of the same greater work and yet exist independently. Spirit, of course, also refers back to the rare liquid, and the idea of savoring it—perhaps at the same time as someone else, somewhere else.