Alex Florov: Smooth Volcano with Bamboo 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.

Alex Florov crafts highly sculptural, Freehand-inspired designs with a regularity and precision that boggles the mind, deftly rendering a wide assortment of shapes that are not just expertly engineered but also aesthetically rich. The Volcano is a shape Florov produces frequently, but each one is unique in its own right, and that remains true for this particular iteration. Though rendered with a playful asymmetry, this piece retains the shape's core spirit, offering the form's telltale bowl, complete with a wide, ridgeline-wrapped base and an upward taper. Here, however, Florov has stepped the taper, with the broad base giving way to a gradual narrowing before reaching a second ridgeline near the rim and then continuing the taper to the rim itself. He's fitted his shank to three knuckles of bamboo that, like the bowl, are lopsided, with this playful asymmetry paradoxically unifing the composition quite masterfully.