Craft Spotlight: Cerâmica Vieira
Five generations and more than 150 years old, the last traditional ceramics workshop in Sao Miguel, Azores
On the island of Sao Miguel in the Azores, known for its wild paradise of lush landscapes, volcanoes, hot springs, crater lakes and epic coastline, there is a 155-plus-year-old ceramics studio/shop/museum still owned and operated by the same family dating back five generations of potters. And if that’s not extraordinary enough, every nook and cranny of this sprawling craft institution is open to visitors in all its ceramic-making glory. In most Portuguese olarias, the showroom is usually the star, and if you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse into the back of the workshop where potters are splattering the walls with clay and bisqueware is stacked floor to ceiling. Here, the focus is flipped. The modest showroom displays pottery simply and without much flash, while an expansive maze of process-specific rooms unfolds into an accidental living museum with longtime throwers and painters heads-down in the vernacular tradition.
For anyone interested in the history and the traditional techniques, this kind of unrestricted access is a rare, improbable joy. We visited in the off-season (essentially anytime that’s not summer), and had the solitary run of the place. I walked around, spellbound, incredulous by how much freedom we had to explore on our own. Potters at work are a special kind of craft magic, but the uninhabited work spaces are equally evocative— like standing in an empty church alone, if you worship at the altar of handcraft. This is where you find the quiet beauty of creative chaos: a woven hand towel slung over a sink next to messy glaze buckets; a crowded stack of unglazed seconds on a paint-splattered window ledge; a lump of half-dried clay doubling as a holder for tools.