Adam Davidson: Calabash with Bamboo Charcoal and Resin Tobacco Pipe

Since 2015, Smokingpipes has hosted the American Pipe-Making Exposition, celebrating the ingenuity and talent of artisan carvers across the United States. However, in 2024 the Exposition expanded to include all pipe makers around the world — the Global Pipe-Making Exposition, the first of its kind. Though broadened in participation, the Expo's format remained consistent with previous years: Artisans designed and fashioned pipes centered on a singular theme, distinct to each year, expressing the motif according to their own creative visions. For the first Global Pipe-Making Exposition, we returned to the Expo's very first theme: bamboo.

If the Expo were a show on Food Network, Adam Davidson wouldn't just cook the most amazing meal the judges had ever tasted, he'd be the chef who raised and butchered his own livestock, cultivated and harvested his own crops, ground his own flour, fashioned his own proprietary cookware, and thrown and glazed his own ceramic dishes. Then, he'd have spent years hybridizing and modifying his own ingredients to create a dish that defied all conventional understanding of cuisine. Essentially, that is this Calabash pipe.

In its final form, this pipe belies its own manufacture. It appears a relatively straightforward cast of resin, with dark pieces of bamboo charcoal suspended within. However, that's not the reality. This pipe is the culmination of dozens of hours of research and development alongside dozens more hours spent manufacturing castings and molds of wood, plaster, rubber, and resin; employing vacuum, heat, and pressure; then turning, shaping, sanding, and polishing the final form. Moreover, Davidson created charcoal from bamboo for the pipe's aesthetic motif: first stabilizing the bamboo, then sanding and cutting individual pieces to 1/8", and suspending them between the two castings that form the inside and outside walls of the Calabash.

From a shape and functionality perspective, this pipe is as traditional a Calabash as they come: It features a hollow inside to cool the smoke before it reaches the stem, with the tobacco chamber housed in the domed, removable cap. However, aesthetically, it appears otherworldly — Lovecraftian, even. The resin passes light for a gleaming, translucent quality, and the bamboo charcoal looks to float unaided as if alive within. It's a genius combination of the traditional and the unprecedented, supported by the expertise and ingenuity of a craftsman who knows no limitations.