In the white stone barn behind the brick house you’ll find Maria Ekberg’s ceramics workshop and gallery. Follow the roses lining the stone path and a whole oasis of lush plants opens up before you. This is no ordinary garden – Maria calls it a garden of inspiration. You might find inspiration in the plants, in its many different rooms, or in rusty iron combined with ceramics.
If you look down, you’ll discover lavender, hyssop, and a whole herb garden growing around the old stone well.
The herbs – and even the roses – have their names on little porcelain tags: Tarragon, Thyme, Rosemary. Pinch a few leaves, breathe in the scent, taste…
Maria’s work is largely inspired by the seed pods in her garden. They started out as garden art but have, over time, grown into all sorts of shapes – and they’ve shamelessly begun scattering their seeds here and there!
Creativity, it turns out, isn’t all that predictable!
When the gallery isn’t open for the summer – she runs it full time from Midsummer to mid-August – she helps other ceramicists improve their throwing technique, ceramic knowledge, and glazes through KeramikAkademin’s digital ceramics courses. The ambition is to pass on a few decades of ceramic know-how to the next generation of ceramicists. Living with ceramics and creating with clay is a dream for many stressed-out souls.
As one of Sweden’s first female master potters, it’s almost a duty to take on apprentices and share the love of clay and creating.
Caught by clay early on
You may have met her in Granna, where she ran a pottery for about twenty years – first on Brahegatan, just across from the church, and later at Hallska Gården. Or perhaps later on Öland, where she worked for a few years before moving to Österlen and Hammenhög in 2008.
Maria’s life in ceramics began early – she’s been working with clay her whole life, practically born in a ceramics workshop, as she likes to say. Her mother is Ninnie Ekberg Forsgren, a ceramicist who has been active since the late 1950s.
After school, the ceramics workshop was her second home, and she spent much of her time alongside her mother’s co-workers. That’s where she learned to throw and the whole ceramic process, taking her first lessons at the wheel from professional thrower Martin Jansson. Everything she did in her youth was shaped by clay, including her first summer job, which she landed thanks to Carl Harry Ståhlhane, who suggested she go to Stoke-on-Trent to work as a designer. She spent a summer at the Myott & Son factory, a classic British china works known for its traditional copper-plate prints.
After a few years of business studies at Hantverkets Folkhögskola and Påhlmans Handelsinstitut, Maria took over Ninnie Ekberg Forsgren’s ceramics workshop, which by then had several employees. Taking on a company at just 20, following in the footsteps of such an enterprising mother, proved tough, so she sold the business and moved to Granna to pursue her real dream – to become a ceramicist and create on her own terms.
In Granna she started up Hallska Gården, a town farmstead that grew into a craft center with many different trades, where she worked for twenty years. During this time she also took on assignments in Portugal, designing for the Swedish market. In the early 1990s the pottery moved to Brahegatan 19, and she began creating the pottery she would become known for.
She collaborated with Jönköpings läns museum and set up a working pottery inside the museum. Over twenty years she researched 18th-century pottery, and her Paradfat display plates were created during this period. She has exhibited at Nordiska museet, Kaolin and Östergötlands hemslöjd, Eksjö museum, Näs, Kalmar Castle, and a number of other well-known venues.
In the mid-1990s she stepped away from ceramics as her main livelihood and co-founded an IT company that developed search systems for museum collections.
The IT world took a great deal of time and energy, but working in the ceramics studio gave her back her balance – creating with clay and the meditative rhythm of throwing became a refuge from complicated databases. A new spark as a ceramicist came when she moved to Österlen; the creative energy of her colleagues, the closeness to major cities, and her lush garden all provide ongoing challenge and inspiration.
You can visit Maria’s Gallery in Hammenhög during the summer.