Paloma Clay Studio, San Miguel De Allende, Mexico
January 19-24, 2025
Richard Burkett
Old Dog/New Tricks: throw, build, extrude - new ways to work with clay
Have you been looking for a ceramics workshop that will fill you with new ideas, new ways to work in clay, and increased throwing and hand-building skills? Come to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico in January 2025 to join Richard Burkett for a fun hands-on five-day workshop in clay! We’ll work with functional forms that combine hand-built, wheel-thrown, and extruded forms with evocative textures, creative lids, and new handle ideas. Handbuilders and throwers are both welcome. Learn how to make your own unique clay extruder dies. How to quickly make hollow forms from textured slabs. You’ll return home excited to have learned so many new ideas for your own ceramics.
Waitlist
February 23-28, 2025
Tip Toland
What's On Your Mind? Portrait and Other
This will be a 5 day workshop where we will build a life size anatomical head and combine it with something else of each artists choosing, which speaks to what is on your mind. It could be a portrait of you or someone who is thinking or concerned with something particular. We will build a life size solid clay head as well as the other piece to be combined with it, hollow it out and fire it. Because it is a 5 day workshop we won’t have time to paint it, but we can create a one of a kind double portrait.
Students are encouraged to bring photos of the head they’d like to sculpt as well as what they ‘d like to combine with their head. Lots of demos and brainstorming will be readily available.
Wait List
March 16-21, 2025
Tony Clennell
Finding Your Voice: Casual Work and Extreme Handles
It has been said that you can learn to make pottery in 7 years or Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000-hour theory. It then takes another 7 years to develop a signature. This course is about making and critically looking at what you are making and what you would like to make. Everything you take home will be in your head with enough new information on the making process to keep you growing in your studio practice.
Individual and group critiques are part of the process and will begin with a look at what we made the day before. Usually, a morning coffee break is a good time to talk pots.
My signature that has developed over the past 45 years is casual pots with extreme handles. This is of course the course's subtitle "Casual Work and Extreme Handles".
Waitlist
April 6-12, 2025
Lorna Meaden
Decorating Utility:
Balancing Utility & Aesthetics
Making functional pots requires standing between utility and aesthetics; form and function. As potters, we balance how things look with how things work.
In this workshop, we will make several different pots- from simple cups and bowls to more complex pots that pour. First, we will zero in on the form and then explore ways of decorating that relate to that specific form. The goal will be to integrate form and surface, elevating the pot. We will throw and alter pots on the wheel, assemble them, and then experiment with various decoration techniques. Surface decoration techniques will include Mishima, stencils, masking, water etching, and more! Techniques will translate to all temperatures and firing processes that participants use in their studios back home. Join us!
