Everybody drinks. Something. Water, tea, wine... And everyone needs a vessel from which to drink.

Nishapur, Istanbul, Al Mina, Timbouctou, Ban Chiang, Tiwanaco, Songdo, Samarkand, each ancient ceramic culture has contributed distinctive elements of design to special cups made for offering and celebration.

Documented in Imbibe are 108 wood-fired drinking vessels, which illuminate archetypes of sacred iconography and form in ceramic history. This world family of cups is unified by the thread of a shared visual language, and the numeral 108 is spiritually significant.

Created throughout one year by artist Pamela Nagley Stevenson, this body of work is an interpretation of eight thousand years of ceramic cultures, referencing ancient cups from sixty-four counties and 108 archaeological sites.

Fired together on a summer solstice, in a large two-chamber catenary arch wood-fired soda-kiln built by the artist, this project is a culmination of four decades of work as potter in a rural mountain valley of British Columbia.

This book complements the gallery exhibition of IMBIBE: Vessels of Illumination—a ceramic celebration of global unity.