Silver Lining Briar (Silver Gray)

Silver Lining Briar is the name of the pipe bench Silver Gray runs alone in the Applegate area of southwestern Oregon. Gray is remembered as one of the still-tiny handful of women pipe makers worldwide; her signature has become synonymous with small, geometrically structured bodies.

Before the Craft

Gray's profession before coming to pipes was something else entirely. She worked in accounting for thirty years and for a period ran her own office. Alongside this steady work she engaged in sewing and quilting; these pursuits, resting on measurement, proportion, and surface, are, in her own account, a prominent factor preparing her sense of form in pipes. She has lived in Applegate since 1978.

An Introduction to Briar

Her entry into the craft came through her husband and first teacher, pipe master Brad Pohlmann; the two still share the same workshop today. Gray did not begin by attempting to make a whole pipe, but by doing small experiments on scrap briar pieces. The aim was to learn by hand how the wood responded to carving, sanding, and staining. After these experiments she moved on to studying pipe shapes and drawing her own designs. Her first pipe was a Dublin, which went unsold and stayed with her.

Workshop Practice

Gray says the hardest stage to learn was the lathe. Watching Pohlmann and going through a good deal of trial and error, she reached the point of doing her own lathe drilling; she opens her own bowls and smoke channels. She does not use ready-made mouthpieces either, shaping them by hand from ebonite and Cumberland rod.

A pipe begins as a drawing on paper, reaches rough shape on the grinding wheel, and is followed by drilling, hand sanding, hardening, a second round of sanding, staining, and polishing. Since every stage passes through the same hands, the bench's annual output is low: a 2016 profile reports fewer than twenty pipes were being made a year at that time, the work squeezed into evenings and weekends. The pace may have changed in later years.

Formal Approach

Her designs read together the traces of Danish and American traditions. Gray has said Sixten Ivarsson's innovative shapes were decisive from the very first day, and she has reinterpreted some of the master's designs. She favors small, light bodies, six- or eight-sided paneled constructions, diamond-shank cross-sections, and bulldog derivatives. The "Eskimo Egg," which joins a round bowl to a sharp diamond shank, is regarded as the signature shape that most clearly shows this mathematical approach.

A bench at this scale is a good example of the current structure of the American handmade pipe scene: not a factory but a one-person workshop, not a series but numbered pieces.