Asperitas

Sandra Olivieri was seventeen years old and a long way from home when she first sat down at a potter’s wheel. She was on a school exchange from the linguistics high school in Gorizia, a small city on the border between Italy and Slovenia, and the exchange had taken her to Beijing. Someone sat her down in front of the wheel, showed her how to centre the clay, and she knew, immediately, that she wanted to be a ceramicist.

After school, Sandra followed her instinct for language and movement. She studied and worked across Spain, Germany, France, and Turkey- building a life shaped by different cultures, different ways of seeing, different ways of making. 

It was in Portugal, while working as a tour guide, that she finally came back to the wheel. She found a teacher, learned to throw and to sculpt, and began, quietly, to develop a practice. Then 2020 arrived, and the world stopped. Sandra came home to Gorizia.

In 2021, Sandra opened Asperitas in Gorizia: a ceramics studio and workshop that she describes, with characteristic directness, as “the place I would have wanted to exist when I was a teenager who couldn’t find a wheel course.”

The name she chose is layered in the way that good names tend to be. In Latin, asperitas refers to roughness- the texture of the raw, impurity-rich clays she uses, coarse and honest under the fingers. It also describes a composition full of movement and contrast, which is how Sandra understands both her work and herself: in perenne movimento, in perpetual motion, like clouds.

And then there is the meteorological meaning: asperitas is a rare cloud formation- Undulatus Asperatus- heavy and storm-like in appearance, yet one that tends to dissolve without breaking, leaving the sky calm. Sandra speaks of this as her quiet wish for everyone who brings one of her pieces home: that the sky always clears in the end.

Asperitas produces functional ceramics made to be used, handled, and lived with. Each piece is thrown on the wheel or hand-built by Sandra herself, from clays selected for their mineral character and natural colouring rather than their uniformity.

Rather than relying heavily on glazes and added colours, Sandra works with the clays’ own tones, blending different mineral compositions using the Japanese neriage technique- a method of layering and folding different clays together to produce marbled, smoke-like patterns that are entirely unpredictable and entirely unrepeatable. No two pieces are the same. 

After studying ESG principles at the University of Udine and reading Circular Ceramics by British ceramicist Sara Howard — a documentation of how to make pottery entirely from industrial waste materials — she began to look seriously at what she was using and how. What she found troubled her. Ceramics production, even at the small artisanal scale, has a significant environmental footprint: the kilns, the materials, the water, the waste.

She invested in a clay sediment trap that filters waste water and allows clay residue to be recaptured and reused. She stripped her palette back, replacing glazes and added colourants with the natural variation in the clays themselves. She created her #zerowaste collection from the leftover scraps of her clay blends- pieces with colours that are always a surprise, because they come from whatever remained.

What makes Sandra’s approach to sustainability particularly worth trusting is the way she writes about it. She does not claim to have solved anything. She reflects openly on the difficulty of these choices, acknowledges that no material she uses is without impact, and presents her reasoning transparently so that customers can make their own informed decisions. She once wrote, with characteristic dry warmth, that the only truly sustainable option she had found was to hide in a ditch and become a frog. It is the kind of honesty that is genuinely rare, and entirely disarming.

Asperitas is not only a production studio. It is also a teaching space, a creative community, and, as Sandra puts it, a home for anyone who feels the need for a little creativity in daily life. She runs wheel and hand-building courses that have drawn students from across Friuli Venezia Giulia, and has taught workshops for the University of the Third Age in Pordenone, for the Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired in Gorizia, and for the Fondazione Radio Magica.

The reviews from her students speak to something beyond good instruction: patience, warmth, genuine enthusiasm, a passion for the material that is apparently impossible to sit next to without catching. She built the studio she wished had existed. It turns out a lot of other people wished it had existed too.

Why we love Asperitas

We fell in love with Sandra's work first, but once speaking to her, we realised how her personality, soul and passion makes it possible. Anyone following her instagram knows she's one in a million. We are so excited to see her collection with Euporium develop voer time.