Latvia 2018 - Ceramic Laboratory, Mark Rothko Art Center, Daugavpils, Latvia

Lilia, Alena, Aivars, David, Ilona, me, Sandra, Zsofie, Nizam, Inita, Mudita, Zina, Toro, Ilona, Valentin, Una

I love to potter and the more I do it the more I love it. I potter only bowls. At every Residency I potter bowls and include them in the working process that I find at these locations. In Latvia I was lucky to get to know the technique called smoke firing. I pottered with clay that can fire up to 1150°C. The kiln is very special too. After we heated it up to 1150°C with wood we let it cool down to 800°C and after that we put a bucket of sawdust and oil mixture in a hole and completely sealed the kiln. The smoke goes deep in the clay and creates these fantastic pattern. Because we fired the kiln to the maximum temperature of the clay, The bowls warpt a bit and they look fantastic.

I also continued my series brutal style mugs and gave a lecture about it. Big thanks to Nizam Onal for the movie he created :-)

I developed a series of concrete and bricks that is also inspired by Daugavpils City. You can see lots of homes of the soviet times and they used exactly this material. It`s part of a bigger series called instant ceramic.

And I also played around a bit with the idea of instant ceramic