Glenmorangie 50 Years Old – Together in Spirit: Peter and Laurie Pincus

November 11, 2026

Glenmorangie 50 Years Old – Together in Spirit

Peter and Laurie Pincus

Sometimes amid life’s comfortable routine, you take a new direction and find yourself changed in ways you never expected.  Peter Pincus and his wife and partner Laurie have just returned from Tokyo after their Asian launch of Glenmorangie 50 Years Old – Together in Spirit.  This installation of the distillery’s scotch whiskey is presented in 149 one-of-a-kind ceramic vessels created by the Pincuses.  An Associate Professor of Art at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Peter Pincus describes the past three-years as a journey into unknown territory that took him from his comfortable community, honed his artistic aptitude, and tested his concept of art.

For many years, Peter and Laurie had been developing a signature technique using colored slip and molds to create a veneer surface on vessels.  They work as a team, designing the vessel, developing intense colors, and painstakingly creating the veneer in puzzle-like pieces.  Peter, who initially began by using the wheel to create the piece, now uses Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software to design the form.  He then creates a plaster mold that is deconstructed so that colored slip can be poured on individual elements.  Laurie, who creates the colored pieces, says they call themselves “Team Flat” and “Team Round” – Laurie working the flat surfaces and Peter putting it all together in the finished three-dimensional form.  Peter says the pieces are technically usable pottery, though they exist somewhere on the spectrum between functional pottery and sculpture. 

   

Peter studied art at Alfred University, earning a BFA in 2005.  He held a residency at The Mendocino Art Center and worked on installations with Wayne Higby.  At the Turk Hill Craft School, he taught Ceramics and worked in Metal Crafting.  He says he was drawn to the complexity of the metal working process.  “You’re not reliant on just one thing,” he says.  “There are many tools, each for a specific part of the process – welding, grinding, bending, etc.”  He would bring this affinity back to his work in clay, breaking apart the creative process with many individual steps.  As his artistic vision matured, he returned to Rochester to earn his MFA and was hired by Roberts Wesleyan College in Chili, NY.  He served as Studio Manager at the Genesee Center for Arts and Education in Penfield, NY.  He and Laurie met and eventually married. Although Laurie has no formal art training, she easily stepped in as an assistant and manager of Peter’s artistic life, a role that would blossom as their lives moved in a new direction.

   

In 2022, the Glenmorangie Distillery Company put out a search for artists through an agency.  Looking for a creative way to display and sell a very limited edition of a 50-year-old Scotch whiskey, Glenmorangie wanted something unique.  Peter responded with examples of his innovative technique.  The variety and intensity of the colors in his work spoke to the distillers of a liquor known for its complex and intense flavor and color.  Peter received the commission.  This began a three-year period that consumed the Pincuses and inserted them into a world of business and luxury unknown to them before. 

Peter describes his world initially as an art student and eventually as a working artist and academic as one where the ethos of living a creative life, promoting access and diversity, and pursuing an aesthetic ideal colored his daily life.  “To be thrust into the world of business – especially in a very high luxury business,” he says, “put us in a place that was very new to us, but ultimately propelled our work decades further than it would have been in our comfortable environment.”  The complexity and precision of meeting the demands of a client made the commission unlike any work he had experienced.  “Every touchpoint had to be perfect,” he says.  The exacting demands of the client drove Peter and Laurie to be equally exacting in their work.

The distillery had a limited quantity of the old scotch.  Peter’s concept was to display the bottles encased in ceramic vessels, arranged in a geometric installation.  The design ultimately called for 149 vessels, which both utilized the quantity of scotch available and met the aesthetic and logistical demands of the piece.  Each ceramic vessel, which would, in essence, encase the bottle of scotch, was made in three closed, double-walled forms that were glued and secured with metal straps.  Both Laurie and Peter worked closely with Standard Clay to achieve the intensity of the glaze color, the integrity of the porcelain slip, and the ideal firing process.  “We worked several months testing clay bodies and firing ranges,” Peter says, “to develop the architecture of the back wall.”

When the project was finally complete, Glenmorangie planned four launches around the world – Scotland, New York City, Paris, and Tokyo.  Peter and Laurie attended all four.  “It’s a bittersweet ending,” says Laurie.  “After all these years, the people at the company have become good friends.”  Peter says that the ceramics community has always been a very tight one and that he feels somewhat severed from it.  “I guess we never quite fit in in the first place,” he muses, “with our work not being quite utilitarian and not quite sculpture.”  He says, though, that the experience has “expanded their minds, in terms of what is possible.”  He wants to teach his students that part of being an artist is Change: change in perspective, openness to the other’s world.  “I want my students to learn to develop a perspective of their own, and that involves always being open to change,” he concludes.

As Laurie and Peter fly home from Tokyo with thoughts of their 149 painstakingly created vessels finding homes (for a five-figure price each), it is the artists within them that will remember the discoveries and failures of the process, the excitement of the successes, and the glory of the final installation of an artistic statement realized.

 

Learn more at www.pincusporcelain.com, https://pincusporcelain.com/glenmorangie50yearold, or on Instagram @pincusporcelain.