Ken Dederichs: Smooth Cobra with Boxwood Tobacco Pipe

Japanese-born artisan Ken'ichiro Dederichs-Uchida spent the first part of his professional life as an architect in his native country, his education in the field and years of experience informing his evolution as a pipe maker. Dederichs began carving in 2005 as a hobby and in 2007 moved to Germany where, a year later, he realized that pipe making had become his true passion, taking on the craft as a full-time career. Dederichs' perspective on design is truly a singular one, interpreting old world shapes through the lenses of both the Japanese and Danish schools, something clearly seen in this Cobra.

I'm immediately struck by the resemblance of this pipe to the Elephant's foot, though it's a good bit different from Dedrich's renditions of the latter shape, mainly through its use of ridgelines. Even considering past iterations of the Cobra we've seen from Ken, this is quite a different imagining of the modern shape, with a pair of firm ridges running through the flanks and framing the panels which comprise the fore and aft walls. These ridges wrap around the entire midsection of the bowl and surround the chamber, creating a dome for the rim as the briar rises. The shape of the fore wall here is Shield-like in its outline, but the aft's is far more curvaceous, the rim jutting out toward that side and effectively making an area of convex negative space which pulls some of the visual weight toward the transitional area. Said transition leads to a trim, swiftly tapering shank that's met by a thin band of black vulcanite before being married to a flared length of domed boxwood, stylistically mirroring the rim before finding itself paired to a slender, demurely curved vulcanite stem with a firm expansion ring at its base. Despite the wealth of rigidity here thanks to these ridges and flares, the overall shaping of the stummel remains rather soft, with ample curves abounding nearly everywhere else. The result is a nearly endlessly intriguing composition which is rich with substance and minute details to appreciate, the warm chestnut stain of the stummel and bountiful birdseye it reveals at the fore only adding to the allure of this piece.