Back to Earth

It is only when you feel at home in the here and now that you can have peace.

Thich Nhat Hanh

One of the beautiful things with clay is that it appears in many different colors.
The purest clay which can be found in nature is porcelain clay. It is purely white and after firing in some cases even translucent. The reason is that it emerges at exactly the same place where it originally has been formed.
Through rain and rivers clay minerals are being dissolved, relocated and mixed with materials like iron, before they settle down again at places like sea grounds etc. That’s how you get the different colors, from yellow to red until dark brown and even black.

My idea was to create a new collection of hand thrown ceramics with layers or waves of different types of clay, which remind of the banded rock formations found for example in Australia and England.

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Not all kinds of clay can be combined on the potter’s wheel, and it took me quite a while to find different colors which actually work together well.

After combining the colors on the potter’s wheel the newborn vessel is covered by a layer of greyish slip and still looks like nothing. However, when the pot is leather hard and when the outer layer it is trimmed off with a special tool on the potter’s wheel, the beautiful pattern of the combination of the different clays appears on the surface. It is always a surprise, because every piece comes out differently, no one looks like the other.

After drying the pot is bisc-fired at 980 degrees Celsius. Then the outside is polished with fine diamond sandpaper on the potter’s wheel in order to make it soft and smooth. Now the inside of the vessel is glazed with a shiny transparent glaze and then it is fired once again, this time at 1200 degrees. It is only then that the pot finally appears in its pure and deep earth colors. In the end the mat surface will be polished once more until it is soft and smooth like a baby’s bottom.