Heidi Blomstedt

Heidi Blomstedt, born Sibelius in 1911 at the Sibelius residence Ainola, her father being composer Jean Sibelius. Blomstedt would excel in her ceramic work, her designs breaking with the style at the time.

Blomstedt was home schooled by her mother but later studied ceramics at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, graduating in 1932. In the summer of 1929, at the wedding of her sister Margareta, Heidi met the architect Aulis Blomstedt. They married in 1932 and had two children in 1937 and 1946.

The ceramist Elsa Elenius taught at UIAH from 1930 until 1962 and both she and the ceramist A. W. Finch made a great impact on Blomstedt. She made the observation that homeware articles and decorative objects were hard to tell apart because the homeware was often overly decorative. Thus she reasoned that rational design was the way to elevate the everyday life. This was also reflected in her husbands work and art and they wrote articles together on the subject.

After graduating from the university she predominately worked as a freelance ceramist with a focus on objects of a minimalist nature. She briefly worked in stints during her studies at the Arabia factory (1873- ) in Helsinki, Finland and at Upsala-Ekeby (1886-1980) in Uppsala, Sweden in the 1950s.

Inspired by her ceramic work at the factory in Sweden, Blomstedt crafted a series of ceramic bowls and vases in geometric shapes at the ceramics factory Kupittaan Savi (1921-1969) in Turku, Finland in the early 1960s. Later in the decade she worked at the Kumela glassworks (1933-1985) on a similar design language – thick glass bowls and vases named Lumilasi (Snow Glass).

Blomstedt also worked on a series of clay masks in the late 1960s.

“Simplicity has justified its legitimacy in contemporary interior design”

Blomstedt’s design expression was stripped of decoration and relied on colours and shapes, which for example at Kupittaan Savi clearly put them apart from the rest of the production at the factory. She designed them with clear shapes in mind with the colours yellow, red, brown and blue, and they work especially well as a series.

Her work have received new found interest in the 2000s with objects rarely surfacing at auction.

Heidi Blomstedt 

• 1911-1982
• Best known for her ceramic work at Kupittaan Savi in the early 1960s
• Her works were presented at industrial design exhibits in the 1930s as well as the Paris World Fair in 1937
• Her collected works were exhibited at Gallery Pinx (1957- ) in 1963