Johanne Birkeland
Jossolini is founded and run by Johanne Birkeland, a Norwegian ceramist working from both her workshop at Tjøme and her Oslo-based workshop at Kroloftet. Every product is designed, made and fired at her workshop, using traditional crafting skills such as wheelthrowing, pinching and coiling.
Her fascination for clay and the characteristics and qualities of the different clays is what drives her work, and is evident in the translucency and frailty of her porcelain pieces and the coarse surface texture of her stoneware products.
Johanne’s work is inspired and defined by the clay as a material, and how much the clay can take and to what extent she can and will control its collapse. When Johanne builds the larger pieces, such as lamps and vases, she uses a coarse stoneware clay to build a main construction. When the construction collapses, she tries to control it just the right amount. In the process of balancing between letting the clay go and her controlling its form and its collapse, she thrives to find an organic yet expressively feminine form.
For Johanne’s smaller, hand thrown pieces, she mainly use porcelain clay. Here she also experiments with the stretchiness and elasticity of the clay. Porcelain is more plastic than ordinary clay, but its much more delicate and it cracks easily. She tries to deform the clay at just the right time during its drying process as much as possible, without it cracking.
