Icelandic Light and Japanese-Inspired Ceramics

My studio is in Iceland, twenty minutes from Reykjavík. The forms I make — yunomi, tea bowls, quiet cylindrical cups — come from a Japanese tradition. People sometimes ask how those two things fit together. Honestly, they fit almost too well.

Both cultures made a virtue of leaving things out. Japanese ceramics value the unforced surface, the asymmetry that is accepted rather than corrected, the object that serves daily life without announcing itself. Iceland performs the same edit on a landscape scale: black sand, moss, basalt, weather. Very few elements, arranged with total conviction.

What the light does

Icelandic light is the strongest influence on how I judge a surface. In summer the light barely leaves; in winter it arrives low and sideways for a few hours and is gone. Low-angle light is merciless with ceramics — it rakes across a glaze and shows every ripple, every place where the wall hesitated, every pooling of the glaze in a trimmed line.

Judging pieces in that light changes what survives. A surface that only works under gallery spotlights does not get out of this studio. A surface that becomes more interesting as the light drops — where a matte glaze holds shadow, or crystals catch the last of it — that is the work I keep.

Landscape as palette

I try not to illustrate Iceland — no printed puffins, no map of the island in the glaze. The landscape enters the work at the level of color and texture instead: glazes that sit near moss green, glacier blue-grey, ash, and the deep near-black of wet basalt. These are colors you stop noticing as colors when you live here; they are just what the world is made of.

Where a glaze breaks thin over the rim and shows the toasted clay beneath, the effect is close to lichen finding the edge of a stone. That is not a metaphor I chase while glazing — it is something I recognize afterwards, and it tells me the piece belongs to this place.

Restraint is a practice, not a look

The Japanese idea that is easiest to import and hardest to practice is restraint. It is tempting to add: another color, a decoration, a clever detail. Most of my editing happens as subtraction — making the wall quieter, the foot simpler, the glaze a single decision executed properly instead of three decisions negotiating.

This family has been working in clay for three generations, and the work has moved from Latvia to Iceland along the way — that longer story is on the about page. The current pieces this thinking produces are in the collection, and the one-off experiments live in the gallery.