Sabina Santos: Sandblasted Author with Mammoth Tobacco Pipe

One of Portugal's artisan pipe makers, Sabina Santos took up the craft of pipe making as a way to express herself creatively, inspired in part by her husband's pipe smoking. For three years she refined her skills through trial and error. Eventually, she traveled to Denmark and studied under some of the world's most talented artisans, including Tom Eltang, Kai Nielsen, Tao, Former, and Kurt Balleby. Santos took the knowledge she accrued from those carvers and married it with her own creative sensibilities, and created a truly unique style that is distinctly her own.

The Author is a rather distinctive shape that's defined by a rounded bowl and a Prince-like shank-and-stem arrangement. Here, Santos has rendered the classic shape with some seriously stout proportions, with the bowl, transition, and shank all boasting a rather muscular build. The bowl appears as an almost perfect sphere, its rounded contours conforming naturally to the hand and softening the shape's rather severe silhouette. The shank-and-stem arrangement strikes a refined S-curve out back that adds a touch of gesture to the overall composition and encourages a comfortable smoking posture. A dark sandblast dresses the stummel and unveils rippling growth rings across the flanks of the bowl, while an accent of mammoth adorns the junction and ties the entire composition together with a dose of color.