Bio
I am Loredana Munteanu, born and raised in Galați County, Romania.
I spent every summer, without exception, in the countryside with my grandparents. It was there that I learned about love and respect for the land, nature, faith, and community. About work and living in tune with the rhythms of the seasons, about simplicity, making things with your own hands, repairing, and accepting cracked and imperfect objects.
I moved homes many times, yet my grandparents’ house remained the same — a place where time seemed to have patience. Gradually, I felt that I could not find my place in the world, nor a clear sense of purpose. I moved to Bucharest, where I explored different fields — sociology, cultural management, calligraphy, art history, and painting — through almost fifteen years of searching. Eventually, I found ceramics, and for the first time, I experienced a sense of clarity and purpose.
After an intense year of study and setting up my own studio in Bucharest, I launched FIOR Studio in 2025. In the process of finding my own language, I began to intuitively reconnect with the practices and inherited gestures of my grandparents, with the land, and with Romanian rural memory, translating them through who I am today.
Process
I work slowly, but with structure. I hand-build my vessels using the coil-building technique, creating one or two collections a year in limited editions. I look for honesty in the material and allow it to remain alive, imperfect, and to retain the traces of its making — cracks, fissures, and organic textures become a natural part of each piece.
At times, I incorporate natural materials gathered during hikes in the Carpathian Mountains. At others, I work with straw, either kneaded into the clay as a reference to traditional rural house-building, or added at the end of the process as a gesture of repair. I am inspired by the practice of repairing and reintegrating damaged objects into everyday life rather than simply discarding them.
My pieces are fired in an oxidising atmosphere, at temperatures between 1220 and 1270°C. Every stage of the process holds its own value and connects me to a form of knowledge passed down through gesture, material, and practice. When a piece is finished, I feel that it no longer belongs to me. Its journey in the studio has come to an end, and it is meant to leave, find the right place, and become part of a new story.
