J Mouton Smooth Asymmetric Tomato w/ Bamboo Handmade Briar Pipe, New

Born and raised in the small town of Gueydan, Louisana, Jason Mouton’s rise in the ranks of American pipe makers has been nothing less than meteoric—and for good reason. Having crafted duck calls since he was a teenager, Mouton’s first forays into pipe making began with carving tampers. Mouton’s unexpected and substantial successes with these handmade tampers encouraged and allowed him to purchase the equipment needed to create pipes themselves. Studying the works of renowned American artisans such as J. Alan, Grant Batson, and Jared Coles, Mouton gradually developed his own pipe making craft, which was furthered by his exchanges with Greek artisan Chris Asteriou. Today, Mouton’s works are some of the most sought after on the artisan market, a demand which he has responded to—and not unlike his beginnings in carving tampers—by reinvesting his successes into an unwavering advancement of his skills and technique. The advent of the “shape first, drill second” approach to pipe making in the post-war years, with its core preference for the sanding wheel over the traditional lathe, unlocked countless possibilities for novel pipe designs. One of the founding genres of this new approach was the “freehand” pipe which, as somewhat implied by its name, centered around decidedly freeform designs, emphasizing grain patterns over figure. Yet when people speak of “asymmetric,” or “asymmetrical,” pipes, it is rarely in reference to Preben Holm, or anyone associated with “freehand” pipes as the term is commonly understood, despite asymmetry being one of the few common, defining features of such pipes. Why would that be? Western aesthetic traditions have known the answer for centuries, and Eastern traditions have known it for millennia: because asymmetry, like many (or perhaps all) objects of experience, is understood in relation to its opposite, to symmetry. In other words, we notice asymmetry in a design relative to its underlying symmetry, which the former stands out against and subverts. In a “freehand” pipe, there is very little symmetry to speak of, and thus they are not seen as “asymmetric,” at least not in the same way as this pipe here, from Louisiana’s J. Mouton. At heart, it’s a tomato shape—a distinctly squat and low-slung rendition, but a tomato nonetheless. It is not the perfect, oblate spheroid typically characteristic of tomato shapes in pipes, neither in their traditional nor modern guises; likewise, its two-knuckle bamboo shank extension does not proceed along a perfectly straight line from the bowl to the mouthpiece. Both are deliberately warped ever so slightly, allowing them to subvert, but not completely deviate from, our expectations of form, which are themselves based in past experiences of similar shapes and from the ways the pipe itself leads us along.   Details: Length: 6″ / 152.4mm Bowl Width: 0.78 / 19.81mm Bowl Depth: 0.96″ / 24.38mm Weight: 1.7oz / 50g