Low-fire ceramic and wood-fired kilns!
Jeps, that sums up my interest when it comes to ceramics:
More specifically; wood firing, DIY homemade & entry kilns, historic ceramics & archeology, craft and culture, raw materials, low-fired glazes, household-based glazes, bushcraft-pottery and earthenware clay.
This website WoodFireCeramic .com is really just my personal notes: Here I write down everything I work with and want to remember. I share new results and projects, or adjust old information when I learn something new. I do believe in the importance of sharing knowledge: WoodFireCeramic .com is my work-in-progress, ceramic low-tech, know-how archive.
And that’s my only ambition as far as this webpage is concerned!
When you think about it; pottery has been all about sharing know-how from craftsmen to craftsmen over generations, a proud tradition practised for tens of thousands of years, in one of humanity’s oldest and most essential crafts. This webpage is my contribution.
Picture of my pottery studio. I know! It’s quite picturesque, almost like a Hobbit house. In old papers, it’s referred to as “Tussebu”. “Tusser” in Norwegian folklore is some kind of goblin, and “bu” means house, so here they live, or so the name says. Well, not really a goblin, I don’t think there exists a good English translation for Norwegianunderground creatures like Tusser.
Tusser was considered real in Norway just a few generations ago, and you should not upset them. They are active in the twilight hour, and though they were not directly evil, they could make a lot of trouble*
Tussebu was built sometime before 1880, in Valdres, Norway. The building was probably a summer farm or shepherd’s hut. But since I found local clay just a few meters away, making pottery here just makes sense to me.
About me:
I have a master of arts in ceramics from Oslo, Norway, but left the career 20 years ago. I guess it makes me too well-educated to be an amateur, and too unestablished to be a professional. Not what I once dreamt of, I admit, but well, here I am.
I like sharing knowledge, I like reading and learning, I like practical material science. I enjoy finding workarounds & testing things, I like trial and error, redoing things over and over until it’s right. I like the craft and the feeling of it all; just holding a lump of wet terracotta and see where it ends up this time.
Vemund, Norway 2024. hello@woodfireceramic.com
* A fun fact about Nisser and Tusser: If you are at home putting away a tool or whatever. And you know you put it on the table, right? But five minutes later, when you need it again, it’s not there! So you search everywhere, but you just can’t find your tool. That’s strange, right? But you have other things to do, maybe time to make dinner or whatever. When you return, the tool is back on the table, just where you thought you put it!
Now that’s the work of Skrømt. It sounds just all too familiar, right?
Incredible as it sounds today, my great-great-grandmother Antonette Bye could inherit an old farm, but refused to move in since Skrømt was living there.
Living on a farm deep inside the forest with only oil lamps for light, in the dark Norwegian autumn, could challenge the imagination of everyone I guess.
Believing in Skrømt was as common back then as belief in UFOs was in the seventies, when “everyone” seemed to have their own UFO observation (even my mother; she swore it flew right over her car). And that’s interesting in itself; how the “unnatural” adapts to our ever-changing culture and beliefs.
Northern lights (Aurora Borealis) photographed over Tussebu in 2025.
Talking about the unnatural; first in 1896, Kristian Birkeland developed a modern, scientific hypothesis about the Aurora Borealis. A phenomenon found in countless myths and legends over thousands of years in the Nordic countries: The Vikings believed it was related to fallen warriors and a bridge to the gods, while the Sami people saw it as a dangerous sign of dead souls.
WoodFireCeramic.com
Also, read about my new kiln:
https://www.woodfireceramic.com/my-new-kiln/
Sacrifices to the Kiln god:
https://www.woodfireceramic.com/sacrifice-to-the-kiln-gods/
About humans fascination with flames:
https://www.woodfireceramic.com/our-fascination-for-flames/
About WoodFireCeramic.com 2025