Loggia View Pottery by Tom Loggia

Loggia View Gazing Sphere

 

All Loggia View Gazing Spheres are one of a kind, personally handmade stoneware spheres made individually using a potter’s wheel. During the creation process only a wet sponge and the hands of the potter touch the outside of each piece, taking extra care to ensure no post-trimming is required and leaving a very natural and beautiful hollow sphere.

 

Loggia View Gazing Sphere’s range in size from 4 to 13 inches and can be fired in wood, gas, electric, raku and pit firing kilns. Different combinations of glazes and firing kilns will result in exceptional colors and textures on each piece, making every single sphere one of a kind. Each piece is made from our own high fire stoneware clay, slips and glazes, each of which is uniquely formulated from the local environment.

 

Gazing Balls like the Loggia View Gazing Sphere are perfect for decoration inside and outside the home, particularly finding their niche as hanging “guardians” for both your home and garden(s). They can be hung, displayed on stands or just placed on the ground in many locations throughout and add quite a bit of character and history to your home or garden.

 

Throughout history, similar style Gazing Balls are often referred to as Gazing Globes, Garden Balls, or Garden Globes, and have been subject to different artistic attentions, superstitions, applications, and admirations for centuries. Early gazing balls were strictly blown glass globes; however they are now available in other mediums such as our Loggia View Ceramic Handmade Gazing Spheres.

 

Although the medium has evolved, the spirituality and beliefs behind these objects has not. Ancient beliefs refer to gazing spheres (circa 13th century) as “witch balls” personifying them with guardian like qualities to fend off evil spirits from the home. By leaving the ball at the entrance to the home it is believed that everything will be protected within. Display of a gazing globe was believed to bring great fortune and good luck, fending off the evil and bad luck from any place in which they were displayed. This belief is seen to have lived into the 19th century, where King Ludwig II of Bavaria (The Mad King Ludwig) decorated his entire castle with these guardian spheres. His strong belief in the gazing spheres had sparked a decorative and spiritual change in Europe that has since carried on throughout history and into what we make today.

 

Tom Loggia, Artisan/Potter, 914-490-3173, Loggiaview@gmail.com

43 Zerner Blvd. Hopewell Junction New York, 12533