In this workshop, we will explore some of the fundamental underlying questions behind the forms, surface qualities, and cultural associations that make up our expressive language of ceramics. Through a series of weekly exercises, opportunities to try on a wide variety of attitudes and approaches as a maker will encourage you to create in new ways and to reexamine and refresh your practice. This course is designed for those who are interested in, and willing to, lean into areas of “the unknown” in their work; if you wish to explore the nature of what lies beyond what is familiar or habitual in your work up to this point, this workshop is for you. Guided projects, using both wheel-throwing and hand-building, and combinations of both, will create a laboratory to support your experimentation and discovery. This course includes both intensive one-on-one guidance in the studio, to assist you in creating a framework from which to gain new perspectives into your work, as well as rotating collaborative projects with your peers in order to play with the unexpected and provide you with opportunities to step outside yourself as a creator. The emphasis in this course is on question-asking, rather than any preconceived notions of the final product, in the spirit of giving the highest values to adventure, creative risk-taking, and expressive vitality.

What you will learn in this class
1. Close examination of the principles that have guided your work up to this point
2. Experimentation with a wide variety of attitudes and approaches to creating with clay
3. New understandings of how to contextualize your work within the culture at large
4. Developing expanded awareness of the “how’s” and “why’s” of your own particular
choices as a maker
5. Broader perspectives on your own nature as a maker, to support new paths forward in
your practice