Your Neighbor: Amy Webber

Neighborhood: Jackson Highlands
Your neighbor since: 1990

When Amy Webber isn’t teaching adult ceramics at Sarasota County Technical Institute, she is designing teapots.

Webber’s teapots, which have won awards in Sarasota and Manatee counties, are on permanent display at Art Uptown.

The teapots range from 5 inches to 20 inches high and have become collector items for art aficionados. The teapots’ unusual style is credited to Webber’s love of contrasting elements.

“I like to make a dilemma,” she says. One of her teapots, the “Queen’s Dress,” best displays Webber’s technique. “The lace of the dress and the clay of the teapot make it both hard and soft.”

Webber has always followed her own path. After graduating from Illinois State University, where she studied commercial art, the Chicago native left her first job as a graphic designer after a year to live out West.

Webber lived in Colorado, Arizona and Wyoming for more than two decades and sold art, played music and worked a variety of jobs.

In 1982, Webber’s self-described “restless nature” led her to Sarasota. She thought she was going to stay for two weeks, but she fell in love with the area.

When Webber moved to Sarasota, she studied architecture at SCTI and did architectural drafting and design work for a private company where she worked for 10 years. But she sought something more.

“There was so much structure in architecture. I needed something non-structure,” she says.

She started taking ceramics classes at SCTI. Webber began making teapots and, although they do hold water, Webber says they aren’t meant to be functional. Her teapots are purely a work of beauty.

“I love the surreal,” she says, “not the ordinary.”

Contact Harriet Sokmensuer at [email protected]