Three generations in clay.

Arnis Preiss, Matiass’s grandfather, is a Latvian ceramicist who worked in Dunte, in the Limbaži region, and gave his working life to crystalline glazes: mineral crystals grown inside the kiln, the temperature held for hours so that zinc and silica bloom into flowers of glass.

A crystalline surface cannot be corrected: most attempts fail, and the ones that succeed can never be repeated. Matiass remembers his grandfather’s hand-thrown vases and refined teapots, and the patience they stood for.

Tenis Preiss, Matiass’s father, made Latvian ceramics in Dunte and was a key figure in the Latvian ceramics world of the early 2000s. Where Arnis pursued mineral fire, Tenis pursued use: cups, teapots and vessels for the hand, thrown with a precision Matiass still measures himself against.

From him comes the family’s working standard — that a handle cannot be decorated into existence.

“A cup can look simple, but the handle reveals everything.”

Matiass was taught directly by both men — not in lessons, but in proximity. Summers in his grandfather’s studio meant watching, trying, failing, and learning to look again.

At three he made a small bowl; it was not kept. Around five came the first kept pieces — handbuilt piggy banks and trays, fired in the same kiln as the grown-ups’ work.

Matiass moved to Iceland with his family at five and lives and works there still. His ceramics carry Latvian clay memory, a long affinity for Japanese forms — the tea bowl, the yunomi — Icelandic quiet and a modern insistence on precision.

Wheel-thrown stoneware in crystalline and crackle glazes, made in short series and finished one piece at a time. Most pieces are unique and some belong to a small run. Numbered pieces are entered in the studio registry, with when each was made and whether it stands alone.

A crystalline glaze is not a decoration; it is an event. The maker chooses the chemistry and the curve of heat; the kiln decides where each flower opens.

A crackle glaze works the other way: glaze and clay are chosen to shrink at slightly different rates, so as the piece cools the surface breaks into a fine net of lines that can never be redrawn.

No two pieces come out of the kiln alike, even within a small run. The standard each generation passed on is the same: if the fire gives you something unrepeatable, the form underneath had better deserve it.

Pieces that meet it join the works; sold ones stay in the archive. How a piece is made is written in the journal.