The workshop of the ceramist and stove fitter Matthias Schawerda is located in the countryside of northern Lower Austria. Matthias is one of the last stove fitters who still installs the tiled stoves with traditional knowledge and craftsmanship. He doesn’t use prefabricated heating inserts, as the industry imposes, but uses loam and fireclay according to traditional methods. For producing glazes, he uses raw materials which he finds in his neighborhood. He digs for feldspar, kaolin, quartz and merges them with ashes from birch trees, vine branch, beeches or chestnut trees, obtaining a variety of different color shades. This is where I built Shrouded Furnace 5. (click for more photos)

In the ceramics studio at the University of Applied Arts Shrouded Furnace 1 and Shrouded Furnace 2 were built.The ceramics studio has remained unchanged since the time when the University was still called “Kunstgewerbeschule”, when artists such as Lucie Rie and Vally Wieselthier were students there.                              (click for more photos)

Between Lago Maggiore and Lago di Lugano, in the north of Milan, are “Le fornaci”, former furnaces for lime burning. The fortresslike chimneys have been used since the 1960s as a ceramics studio.

Today the ceramics studio also houses a small museum with works by Lucio Fontana, Jean Arp, Renato Guttuso and other artists, who used to work there with ceramics in the heyday of “Le Fornaci”. This is where Shrouded Furnace 4 was made.     (click for more photos)

Shrouded Furnace 3 was built in the cloister garden of the Charterhouse Mauerbach. It was modeled in one piece directly on the combustion chamber of a wood-fired kiln, and was fired in the same place.                                (click for more photos)