Kurt Balleby: Smooth Ballerina with Bamboo (724) Tobacco Pipe

Smokingpipes began hosting the American Pipe Making Expo in 2015, soliciting submissions from North America's premier carvers and affording them the opportunity to showcase their most inventive and creative work. For 2024, to celebrate the Expo's 10th anniversary, we've expanded our scope to accommodate carvers from all over the world, turning the American Pipe Making Expo into the Global Pipe Making Expo. Like in years past, the 2024 Expo revolves around a core theme, and appropriately, given the event's birthday, we've returned to our very first Expo's theme: bamboo.

Kurt Balleby is one of Denmark's most respected artisan carvers, and for good reason, given his mastery of the craft and endless pursuit of perfection — a pursuit that's led him to develop a 150-step process that ensures every piece he produces is of the upmost quality. It's hard to argue with his labor-intensive production model when it results in pieces as enchanting and precise as this Ballerina. Originally a Bo Nordh design, the Ballerina, in its platonic form, is designed to resemble its namesake dancer en pointe, or on the tip of their toes. Balleby, as he's done many times before, has lovingly recreated the expressive shape, capturing all of its various nuances: the bowl possessing an arcing curvature; an incredibly demure paneled heel supporting the totality of the shape; a wrapping panel and accompanying ridgelines lending structural definition to the chamber's fore wall. All of the bowl's elements are balanced in profile by the vertically orientated shank-and-stem arrangement, with the shank extended by four knuckles of warm bamboo, their skyward pose immediately capturing the eye. Balleby has dressed this piece in a smooth, silky, contrast-rich finish that highlights tight licks of cross grain across the bowl's flanks and a sea of birdseye along the fore.