About me
Hi, I’m Paulius Vengialis — a self-taught ceramic artist born in 1990 in Kaunas, Lithuania, and now based in Vilnius, where every Vengialis Ceramics piece is made. The clay and I go back further than 2019, but that’s the year everything truly changed for me — the year a rediscovery became a passion, and that passion quietly grew into my whole way of life.
How it all began
My first encounter with clay goes further back than most people expect. Growing up in Kaunas, I had a ceramics class in secondary school — nothing serious, just a few sessions with wet clay and a vague sense of possibility. I remember making two things: a box with a lid shaped like a cake, and an ashtray shaped like a skull. Classic teenage priorities. It was fun, but it didn’t go any further than that, and for a good many years, clay and I went our separate ways.
Then in 2019 I stumbled across the work of artist Stephanie Kilgast on Instagram. Her meticulous, endlessly colourful world stopped me in my tracks. When I discovered she worked with polymer clay, I had to try it myself — but the moment my hands touched that malleable material, it pulled me straight back toward real clay. Within days I was sitting with a pile of stoneware, trying to make something, anything at all. I was hooked, and I haven’t stopped since.
Nobody showed me the formal way in. I built everything through books, videos, the work of artists I admired, and a stubborn refusal to stop experimenting. That’s how I still work today — trial and error, iteration, learning from every single firing. The clay itself has been my greatest teacher, and I’ve thrown tons of it.
From the very start, I was drawn to the potter’s wheel. My love for strict shapes and symmetry found its perfect home there. Every time I center a piece, it feels like solving a beautiful puzzle, and I never get tired of it.
The vase as my canvas
For me, a vase is far more than a vessel. It’s a three-dimensional canvas — the place where I explore surface, color, and texture, and where art meets science in a way that still excites me every day.
I’ve never used commercial glazes. From the beginning, I went deep into glaze chemistry: calculating molar masses, studying metal oxides, running test after test. Blue from cobalt, violet from copper, deep earthy tones from iron — the transformations that happen inside a kiln at high fire still fascinate me. My glazes are entirely self-developed, built up over years of experiments in my Vilnius studio, and no two surfaces are ever quite alike.
If my wheel-thrown stoneware forms are the canvas, my glazes are my unmistakable signature.
Recognition
1000 Vases at Milan Design Week — one of the most celebrated design exhibitions in the world. I was the only artist representing Lithuania, and my pieces were published in the Skira catalogue.
I was awarded first prize among 120 artist from 21 different countries for my Toxic collection at the international Ceramics in Love competition in Castellamonte, Italy.
What drives me
I take my inspiration from everyday life — the things I see, the people around me, the moment I’m in. I’m an improviser at heart, and some of my favorite forms have arrived unplanned, born out of a piece of clay and pure instinct.
What I want is simple: I want the people who hold my pieces to smile. I want them to feel beauty — real, unexpected, made-by-hand beauty. I want that moment of wow when they look at a glaze and wonder how it came to be.
Every piece I make is one of a kind. No molds, no multiples, no shortcuts. Just high-fire stoneware, a wheel, and glazes that took years to develop.
That’s Vengialis Ceramics.