About Studio AOAO

Studio AOAO is a two person practice in Amsterdam, run by Alicja Strzyzynska and Onur Iseri. We cast and carve sculptural lighting and objects in alabaster plaster and ceramic, by hand, in small editions. The work lives between sculpture and function, and we are happy to leave that line blurred.

It began in 2020, when we were both looking for a slower way of living. We turned a spare room of our rental home into a small workshop and started experimenting. Most things did not work. Those failures gave us the textures we now build everything on, and they taught us to stop seeing them as failures at all. When the material does not do what we planned, it is usually showing us a better way.

Our first piece, the Lacuna Lamp, came out of that room. It already carried the idea we still work with today, the dialogue between mass and emptiness, and light used not as a backdrop but as the thing that reshapes a form. In 2021 the studio became official, and that same year we showed at Rossana Orlandi during Milan Design Week, which felt a bit surreal at the time.

Alicja studied design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw and interior architecture in Lisbon, then worked in design studios in Warsaw, Tokyo and Amsterdam. Her grandfather was a sculptor, and she grew up around him and her father working gypsum and clay. The slowness of the craft was never explained to her. It was simply always there. After years of designing interiors she missed working with her hands, and she missed warmth in spaces that had grown cold and overdesigned.

Onur came the other way, from business studies in Tokyo and a career in digital design, a world that is fast and abstract. He needed something physical, something he could touch and feel present with. He is mostly self-taught, shaped by a long study of makers like Henry Moore and Valentine Schlegel, and by years in Japan that taught him to value the quiet, unspoken details.

We work slowly and let the material lead. Over the years we developed a layering technique in alabaster plaster, where tones of one colour are applied, sanded back and applied again until the surface holds a depth we could not have planned. Our ceramics are usually left unglazed, so the surface stays alive to the touch, and sometimes we add chamotte to the clay for a texture closer to stone or bark. We believe that if you spend enough time with a material, it will tell you how it likes to be shaped.

We make objects that ask people to slow down. Some carry difficult feelings on purpose, a quiet presence in the room that invites reflection rather than silence. All of them are meant to work as small grounding anchors, things that help you feel more present in your own world. Everything is made by hand in our Amsterdam studio, in small editions, and no two pieces are the same. And once a piece leaves the studio, it stops being ours. It starts belonging to your story.

Our work has been shown at Milan Design Week, Melbourne Design Week, Glue Amsterdam and the Design Museum Brussels.