I went to a ceramics workshop this past weekend that focused entirely on handbuilding with slabs of clay.
The class was taught by Lynn Wood who is also a teacher at Sharon Art Studio where I take ceramics (though not my teacher.) Anyway she is a professional ceramics person, sells her wares, and is almost exclusively a handbuilder. I on the other hand never handbuild anything, so I thought it would be a good chance to expand my horizons. The workshop was good, it had various projects designed to teach different aspects of slab based handbuilding. Since Lynn was teaching it, there was also a focus on textures which was also nice. The projects were good in that there was plenty of room for diversity and creative changes to whatever we were working on. For example the second day we were making three pieces with using a small rectangular template to make a cylinder with 1, 2, and 3+ darts in it. (A dart being a triangle cut out of an edge, with the two new edges that results in being pulled together and joined.) The variety of differences between the three pieces each person made was quite something, the differences between the students was quite impressive. Someone snapped a picture of them all next to each other, and if it surfaces I'll add it to the post. I ended up making 12 pieces over the course of the 2 days. Three dishes, two conical mugs (think paper coffee cup) a pitcher, two drop mugs, two little teacups, and a tiny little 'teapot' though more likely used as a soy sauce dispenser. The workshop was fairly exhausting, and there were several sick folk there so I'm hoping I don't end up sick. I currently feel fairly terrible but it wasn't a great weekend for on time eating and it's allergy season so I'm hoping it's just that. It will be exciting to get the pieces back and glaze them when the next session of ceramics starts up again.
I went to a ceramics workshop this past weekend that focused entirely on handbuilding with slabs of clay.
The class was taught by Lynn Wood who is also a teacher at Sharon Art Studio where I take ceramics (though not my teacher.) Anyway she is a professional ceramics person, sells her wares, and is almost exclusively a handbuilder. I on the other hand never handbuild anything, so I thought it would be a good chance to expand my horizons. The workshop was good, it had various projects designed to teach different aspects of slab based handbuilding. Since Lynn was teaching it, there was also a focus on textures which was also nice. The projects were good in that there was plenty of room for diversity and creative changes to whatever we were working on. For example the second day we were making three pieces with using a small rectangular template to make a cylinder with 1, 2, and 3+ darts in it. (A dart being a triangle cut out of an edge, with the two new edges that results in being pulled together and joined.) The variety of differences between the three pieces each person made was quite something, the differences between the students was quite impressive. Someone snapped a picture of them all next to each other, and if it surfaces I'll add it to the post. I ended up making 12 pieces over the course of the 2 days. Three dishes, two conical mugs (think paper coffee cup) a pitcher, two drop mugs, two little teacups, and a tiny little 'teapot' though more likely used as a soy sauce dispenser. The workshop was fairly exhausting, and there were several sick folk there so I'm hoping I don't end up sick. I currently feel fairly terrible but it wasn't a great weekend for on time eating and it's allergy season so I'm hoping it's just that. It will be exciting to get the pieces back and glaze them when the next session of ceramics starts up again.
