Nowadays few things feel truly unique. But Edgars Ameriks has managed to carve out a special place for himself in the world of art and fine craftsmanship. The Latvian peat artist has pioneered the innovative use of the natural resource for art and design in his home country and beyond.
Peat has a special status in Latvia. It is one of country’s few domestic natural resources, and its extraction contributes significantly to the Latvian economy and exports. On account of its crucial role, the dense organic material that builds up over thousands of years in wetlands and bogs has been referred to as “brown gold”.
Almost one third of peat used in professional horticulture in the EU comes from Latvia – for growing food and decorative plants as well as tree saplings. One cubic meter of peat can grow 7,000 seedlings, but the resource now is used also in other unexpected ways – in art and interior design.
“Nothing is like peat. It is a very unique material for me,“ says Edgars Ameriks, whose life revolves around peat, not only as the Marketing Manager of the Latvian peat extraction and processing company Laflora.
The 43-year-old is also a peat artist and with his works is setting a benchmark of excellence and innovation in Latvia, hoping to encourage others to study and exploit the potential of peat and to help changing the public perception about his base material and its origin. Not least because peat is often in the crossfire of criticisms due to the environmental impact of its extraction.
In an old Soviet-era building in Kalnciems near Jelgava, Ameriks has created a kind of peat information centre – the so-called Peat House. Located by the river and near the one of peat bogs of Laflora, it serves as his creative haven. There the trained sculptor gives hands-on art workshops, organises art projects and visitors can watch him at work with his favourite material.
“The concept is to educate people about peat and let them know more about it. That it is not just good for food production, soil improvement, or horticulture, but is a versatile eco-friendly material and can be used also for various other purposes,“ emphasizes the peat artist, who seems to have an almost emotional connection to the renewable natural resource.
For more than 15 years, Ameriks has been researching possible new and innovative ways of using peat. Inspired by the law of nature, he first used it as base material for a pot for sprouting plants. “The Peat cube has been the most important event to me. It is designed to create a new life and gave the first impulse to all artistic activities related to the use of peat, “ the artist says at ‘Kūdras nams’, as the Peat House is called in Latvian.
Almost everywhere inside the workshop is peat. No matter where you look, you see the organic material in different forms, sizes and variations. Ameriks designs and makes sculptures, objects, furniture and wall coverings.
Over the years, he has created many types of experimental prototype design and art works made out of peat such as ceiling lamps, vases, tiles or tables with peat surfaces. Unique premium products made from “Latvian marble”, as Ameriks calls the processed peat, in limited amount without standard price tag. Some of them have been already used as interior for public spaces in an office building of a peat extraction and processing company in the Netherlands and in a concept store at a ski resort in Courchevel in France.
“The properties of dried peat are close to pressed wood. You can almost make everything from it – the spectrum is very wide. If you know how to do it and understand what you are doing, then this resource can be exploited very widely and can be modelled in any shape,” explains Ameriks, adding that, however, it needs time, patience and dedication until you can work with it.
Controlling the base material has been a challenge – peat had never been processed in this way before. Ameriks had to acquire the necessary skills over many years on his own from scratch. “The most important things are knowledge and experience,“ he stresses.
Preparing the peat for art and innovation takes around three years – starting with the extraction by hand in the field and the drying cycle in the bog, in barns and indoors in special climate conditions to the final stage when the organic material is dry and stable, and ultimately has the needed properties to be processed.
Sorted nice and neat according to their degree of drought, Ameriks stores and monitors his peat blanks in a warehouse what he calls the peat library, before he forms them in his workshop to art and design objects. He also experimented with peat in epoxy and has developed peat composite material and plaster paint made out of milled peat.
Being more fragile and lighter than timber, peat is very sensitive and durable at the same time.
“This texture is unique. It looks like a stone, but actually it is very light and easier to handle as wood. But you have to be careful since even the slightest physical touch might break down the pieces,“ Ameriks explains after he has cut off a brick-sized piece of a bigger peat block.
Now he carefully takes the piece in his hand and points with his finger to the different shades of colours and density.
“This is like a map for geologists. We can see here various types of plants. Inside there are some dark parts, which means the peat bog once was on fire,“ he says, adding the texture is unique for each peat brick and inspires his choice of what art or design work he will create out of it.
This transformative power of the bog and its uncanny ability to preserve things, partially at least, buried or submerged and left behind for perhaps more sinister reasons, has been a point of inspiration for many artists. Bogs have long played a role in literature, especially poetry. The Irish poet and Nobel laureate Séamus Heaney (1939-2013) once described the bog as “a landscape that remembered everything that happened in and to it”. And just as Heaney returned to the subject again and again in his poems, so has Ameriks explored the bogs in depth and extensively in his practice as a visual artist.
“All my clients for whom I am asked to create some artwork, I always invite first to the bogs and explain to them on site what peat actually is. Otherwise, they will not understand its value,“ he says.
It is possible to take an excursion to the Peat House and learn all about how peat makes for an unusual art and design material. Opening hours: by appointment Adress: Jelgavas iela 22, Kalnciems, LV-3016 Contact: 371 26534088
This feature first appeared in Baltic Business Quarterly magazine and is reproduced by kind permission. You can read more about the German-Baltic Chamber of Commerce in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania at the official website and find out more about the Baltic Business Quarterly magazine here .
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