Ryan Alden: Sandblasted Morta Apple (King) Tobacco Pipe

Every year since 2015, we here at Smokingpipes have hosted the American Pipe-Smoking Exposition, an event that showcases the work and talent of some of America's most esteemed artisans. Each Exposition is centered around a particular theme that challenges the participating carvers to flex their creative muscles. For 2023, the Expo highlights alternative mediums, with the contributors required to submit pipes composed of materials other than briar. To that end, Ryan Alden has submitted this striking Apple rendered from gorgeous morta.

Leveraging a background in sculpture, wood turning, leather working, and ceramics, Texas-based carver Ryan Alden produces pipes steeped in the Anglo-French tradition, with the vast majority of his portfolio made up of modernized shape-chart standards. Though Alden mostly utilizes briar, he's no stranger to alternative mediums, having carved shapes from morta, strawberry wood, and olivewood. His admiration for old-school shaping cues and alternative mediums come together with this handsome piece.

A semi-petrified oakwood, morta is prized as a pipe making material, due to its resilience to heat, its flavor-neutral smoking properties, and its mesmerizing grain. Alden has here maximized the material's distinctive patterning by dressing it in a crisp sandblast, which deftly highlights tight, radiating waves of grain throughout the stummel. Shape-wise, this piece finds a plump, full-bodied bowl set at the fore of a sleek, arrow-straight shank-and-stem arrangement. Said bowl possesses an arcing taper that begins at its supple heel, continues into its wide, bulbous waistline, and terminates at its taut rim, which mirrors the dimensions of the heel. This sort of exacting shaping lends the bowl a rotund quality in hand, with the chamber's contoured walls nicely accommodating wrapping-fingers. Though fairly trim in comparison to the bowl, the shank and stem provide balance to the composition and keep the entire form rather gracile in profile. Dressed in a midnight-black stain, the stummel offers a dark complexion that's complemented by the vulcanite mouthpiece and offset by the electric-blue accent along the junction.