James and Tilla Waters

Can you fall in love with one special cup?

It’s been nearly ten years, since Volta is showing a contemporary stoneware and pottery collection. We started with the kindest people, James and Tilla Waters from Wales, and still adore those little Espresso cups so much.
It is not easy to get the busy couple doing a little edition for us, also… Brexit, but this makes them even more special to us and we really hesitate to sell them at all, to be honest, we would prefer to just keep them to ourselves. And yes, you can fall in love with a cup… or maybe a story or good time behind, but you definitely can.

Hand- thrown stoneware coffee cup glazed in Tenmoku.
The base is unglazed and with makers’ mark.

Height approx. 5 cm
Diameter of foot approx. 5 cm

Matthias Kaiser

Matthias Kaiser studied at Parsons School of Design in NY and at Vienna’s
 University of Applied Arts, apprenticed with two Japanese 
master potters in Seto and Karatsu, spent a combined 2 years 
travelling on the Indian subcontinent and, for a period of
 13 years, he was the akhavan of an Iranian dervish.
His vocation remains: to make pots.
He focuses on the inherent qualities of the material and the 
succession of steps that constitute the process of creation, 
trying to reveal, not hide, what is there and has been done, 
and to give respite from the world of contrived concepts and
 passing excitement.

He has always had an affinity to mystery and obsession.
The alchemical transformation of earth into stone and glass
is full of uncertainties and a never-ending source of amazement.

By subtracting industrial processes as far as possible from the 
refinement of the raw materials and totally from manufacture, 
the finished pieces retain a heterogeneous appearance.
 They are a sum of parts, with infinite possible combinations of 
shape and surface, texture and colour, weight and size.
 His pots contain more than a functional and decorative aspect;
 their poetry lies in the balance of intent and accident as well as
in the interplay of physical attributes.

Jérémy Bellina

Jérémy Bellina is a French, Lisbon based potter on a craftsmanship journey.

He discovered pottery over the past few years and decided to turn it into his full time job in 2019. He operates from a small studio in Lisbon where he spends the vast majority of his time, sourcing raw materials, throwing, glazing and firing his creations.

He aims at creating contemporary, playful and functional pieces of ceramics for your daily use.

Flaÿou

Hella El Khiari and Thomas Egoumenides crossed path in 2009 while studying in the Architecture School of Paris La Villette. Seven years later, they are creating flaÿou, a multidisciplinary, integrative design studio based in Tunis.

Flaÿou inspirations come from the daily life, and aim to create a self-conscious, unformal design, one that wonder about the right things, without taking themselves too seriously.

Flaÿou is dedicated to experimenting with new ecological materials, new composites, the renewed use of materials known for decades and the diverted use of materials.

Volta sells their unique Terracotta Chess and Backgammon boards. The design is inspired and adapted from the traditional art craft of Sejnane’s pottery in Tunisia.
Pottery skills of the women of Sejnane just entered into the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

Studio Fletta

Designers Birta Rós Brynjólfsdóttir and Hrefna Sigurðardóttir founded Studio Flétta in 2017. With backgrounds in product design from the Iceland Academy of the Arts, they bring a high degree of conceptual and process innovation to their works using mundane or often overlooked products and materials.

Their practice revolves around responsible design, utilizing reused materials and local production with an evident respect for craftsmanship and storytelling.

This level of commitment has been extended with Minute, a line of candlestick holders where each piece is shaped by hand from the slab of clay in only one minute, to ensure a local production resulting in an affordable product.

Viv Lee

Based at WASPS Studios in East Glasgow, Hong Kong-born artist Viv Lee makes sculptural ceramics inspired by memories, mythology, and the raw elemental beauty of her adopted homeland, Scotland.

The natural environment provides a rich resource for her work, influencing the colours, textures, and materials used. Works are finished in earthy tones, often using experimental glazes made with natural materials, slips and engobes created from native clays foraged from the landscape, or left unglazed to show the body of the clay.

Marta Bonilla

Marta Bonilla designs and creates her pieces in Barcelona, where her workshop is located.

She started with ceramics a few years ago, and was totally hooked on the material and the freedom that it allowed when working and designing.The pieces that she makes are handmade, with the modeling technique. Her motivation when working is that the object does not lose its naturalness and we see the traces of the creation process.

That the object is beautiful in itself, it is another of her objectives, she is fascinated that while the object does not perform its main function the object becomes a decoration piece.

Ann-Charlotte Ohlsson

Ann-Charlotte Ohlsson is a Swedish potter, graduated from the School of Glass and Ceramics in Bornholm, Denmark in 2000. She moved back to Bornholm in 2004 and was part of an association of workshops and galleries of ceramic artists.

Her way of working with ceramics is modelling, the coil technique, slab work, pinching, or the use of simple cardboard or plaster moulds.

All of her works are fired in a wood oven.