Registry record
Blue Crystalline Bowl
Thrown, glazed, and fired by Matiass Preiss in the studio in Iceland.
Available — €65
A wheel-thrown open bowl in pale stoneware under a zinc crystalline glaze: a lavender-blue ground outside, deep blue within, with blue fan-shaped crystals grown across the inner wall.
- Type
- Bowl
- Dimensions
- H 7 cm · Ø 15 cm
- Clay body
- Stoneware
- Glaze
- Blue zinc crystalline glaze
From the studio
An open bowl, thrown on the wheel in a pale stoneware, laid on its side on the plinth so that it shows its two halves at once. Above, a zinc crystalline glaze in a pale lavender-blue ground, with fine run lines travelling down the outer wall. Below, the clay left bare: light, fine-grained, the foot trimmed flat. Between them the glaze stops in an irregular tide-line. Two darker flecks of blue sit in the glaze near the rim.
Inside, where the glaze lies thick, the ground deepens to a full blue. Across the inner wall crystals have grown in a stronger blue, fan- and flower-shaped, each one filled with fine radiating lines; a few have a pale centre. Between them small seed crystals show as specks and dots. Colouring oxides divide unevenly between crystal and glass, so crystal and ground never match. Throwing rings are visible beneath the glaze. At the well it has gathered into a dark pool, almost black.
Close to, a cluster of crystals at the edge of the pool. The fans overlap and grow into one another, their radiating lines running out to a scalloped rim. Some carry a pale centre, the point from which each spread. Where the blue meets the dark pool a thin amber-red line shows at the edge. Nobody can place a crystal; the maker chooses the chemistry and the curve of heat, and the kiln decides where each flower opens.
Matiass Preiss is a third-generation ceramic artist. His grandfather, Arnis Preiss, a Latvian ceramicist in Dunte in the Limbaži region, gave his working life to crystalline glazes: the temperature held for hours so that zinc and silica bloom into flowers of glass. 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; he spent summers in that studio, watching, trying, failing, learning to look again.
Like every piece here, the bowl was thrown, glazed and fired by Matiass Preiss in his studio in Iceland. A crystalline glaze is fluid enough to run, which is why it is carried well above the foot and the clay beneath is left bare. Nothing here is finished: the glaze softens where a thumb rests and the foot wears to the shelf it stands on. Most pieces are unique and some belong to a small run; numbered pieces are entered in the studio registry.
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