In a quiet house in Barcelona, where the silences of midday live alongside the laughter of two children, the pieces of Oikos Estudio are born. It’s the personal project of Pascale Zintzen, an artist born in Belgium and mother of Marius and Billy, aged 11 and 10. A decade ago she left her home country and found in Barcelona not just a place to live, but also the setting for a deep transformation: turning pain into creation, routine into art, and motherhood into inspiration.

From the start, Oikos Estudio has been much more than a workshop. It’s an intimate, vital space where ceramics, painting and lime mortar intertwine with the everyday. Pascale works with natural, simple, almost primitive materials, with absolute respect for the raw material. Each piece seems to hold something more than form: a pause, a story, a scar.

“Oikos Estudio was born in my home in Barcelona, at a moment of personal transformation. I turned a difficult chapter into art. My inspiration comes from ancient ceramics, my natural language thanks to my studies in archaeology; searching for the balance between culture and nature, noise and silence, outside and inside...”

With a background in archaeology, Pascale finds in ceramics an ancestral language that lets her speak about the present. Her practice is shaped by a deeply personal sensibility, in which art doesn’t move away from life, but blends into it. “My art is born from my day to day,” she explains, “marked by my experience as a single mother and artist. I explore the intersection between feminism, motherhood and creativity, reflecting on the home as a micro-society and the role of women and mothers within it.”

From her perspective, the home isn’t just a physical space, but a symbolic centre that reveals the dynamics of the outside world. In that intimate space, Pascale finds questions, contradictions and also an immense strength. Motherhood, far from being an obstacle to creation, becomes a driving force. And that vital energy — sometimes chaotic, always present — is a fundamental part of her work.

When asked what message she hopes to convey through her work, she answers with three words: “strength, poetry and sisterhood”. That trio captures the spirit of Oikos precisely: the strength that emerges from difficult experiences, the poetry hidden in simple gestures, and sisterhood as a bridge between women, artists, mothers and creators.

In a world that tends to separate the professional from the personal, the artistic from the domestic, Pascale Zintzen does the opposite. Her art doesn’t escape her life; it feeds on it. And in that profoundly honest gesture, she reminds us that creating can also be a way to resist, to heal and to inhabit the world with more truth.