Hello! We are Girts and Jan Gailans, a husband and wife team.

2minty started when we moved house to one with a studio on site, with plenty of space. It was amazing and very quickly we both wanted to act on creative ideas which had been bubbling in the background for a while.

Girts Gailans is a former advertising and architectural photographer who has always been intrigued by hand-built ceramics: the possibilities with shape, texture, glaze and decoration, shaping the clay from a flat lump, without using a wheel, just really engage him.

So a new kiln came to the studio and all sorts of things began to disappear from the house, empty bottles to use as moulds, kitchen scales, and lengths of material to create textured clay all found their way there.

Jan Gailans’ paper weaving started some years ago when she was doing test prints of abstract photos she had taken for book publishers to use on their covers. The fine art paper was so lovely and velvety she couldn’t throw them away. Later she came back to them and cut one into strips, and the rest just followed naturally.

She loves how the colours and textures interact when woven; it’s quite a slow process but she loves to watch it take shape. It’s exacting and methodical work but at the same time, it’s relaxing. She has quite a paper stash, lots of old maps which she loves, old books and shop catalogues. Always the paper is acid free and matt.

Recently she’s really enjoyed making something that is three dimensional: these cotton rope bowls have become addictive. So many ways to decorate, and an infinite number of possible shapes, all so useful. In our house, every prototype bowl gets filled very quickly!

But for both of us, photography is always there.

Once it’s in your blood, that’s it! We both produce images for sale as wall art, and also to be licensed for use as book jackets. These, like architectural commissions, are very exciting when they come in out of the blue!