A current series of these are made to look exactly like dented tin cans in texture, color and form, a kind of ceramic trompe-l oeil . These are Metabolist pieces, Ladin says. The forms are generated by the technique with which I build them. He explains that the Metabolists were a group of architects in the 1960s whose design concept was to make use of modular elements in their design solutions, in a way which would enable these solutions to change over a course of time to solve new problems a they evolved. Expo Habitat 67 constructed for the World s Fair in Montreal.
Metabolist design is like a living organism which can change with use.
Ladin s Metabolist teapots are made of primary geometric shapes combined in various configurations, many with a lustrous gun metal gray glaze. In looking at Ladin s work, you would not think it was the same person who made the teapots, the fired clay figures, the molecular banners, so radically changed are image and media in the various phases of his oeuvre. The leap itself is a kind of synapse connecting one phase to another each, a world unto itself yet strung together as imaginative occurrences evolving with the demands of necessity and inspiration. It s a metabolist view, if you will. When I first saw them at the Donskoj Gallery in Kingston some years ago, I was deeply disturbed by them.