One goal of my time at the Fish Factory - Creative Centre was to explore working in black porcelain. Why black porcelain, you ask? When I visited Iceland in August 2023 on vacation with family (aka my brother, my hopeful-someday-sister-in-law, and her 3 sons), I ventured into the Kaolin Ceramic Gallery in downtown Reykjavik. The gallery is cooperative retail space owned by several ceramic artists and designers, each with their own unique style. Several artists featured there worked with black porcelain and I thought it was just the most beautiful clay I’d ever seen. The work of Valdís Ólafsdóttir and Guðny Haf grabbed my attention the most on that visit, and their work has inspired the idea of working in black porcelain to live in my head ever since that trip.

So here I am. In Iceland. In the village of Stöðvarfjördur for a month in a small village nestled in the eastern fjords, making art, and exploring new ideas at the Fish Factory - Creative Centre as a resident artist. The black porcelain I wanted to work with arrived from Glit on Monday and I spent the day on Tuesday working with this new material. I don’t have much of it so decided to throw one of each of my most popular smaller functional forms - a sweets bowl, a wine tumbler, a teacup, a stein/coffee mug, and a tall tumbler. These forms will get trimmed, altered, and decorated in the coming days. Saved some of the black clay for handles, test tiles, and maybe wearables / jewelry components. Super stoked about the possibilities with this new-to-me material. Now to figure out if I can get the black porcelain shipped to Iowa from the supplier in Denmark.