This workshop is designed for intermediate to advanced throwers and handbuilders and assumes proficiency in the basics. Rather than covering fundamental techniques, it focuses on critically evaluating and refining your current work and style.

Do you make pots well, but you feel like your work is unresolved? Maybe you understand how to throw on the wheel or coil and slab build but for some reason your work just feels a little off somehow or a little stagnant?

In this two-day intensive workshop you will learn to see differently through exercises designed to help you develop a visual vocabulary and begin making simple changes that will elevate your work to a new level. Understanding scale, proportion, relationship, volume, line, shadow, and how surface interacts with design is key to developing quality work. There is no replacement for practice, repetition, and variation, but in order to capitalize on these core tenets of craft you have to learn to see what works and what doesn’t, and how to push the boundaries of what works for you, and for those who view and use your work.

We will begin the two days by talking about and viewing/using what you already make, then we’ll progress through multiple fast and slow, solo, and group exercises (with clay and without), some drawing, writing, and dialog, and of course making, lots of making! Finally, by the end of this workshop you should feel a little uneasy, maybe a little on edge about what’s to come, and that is the point, to be comfortable enough to take risks in your work and to recognize what works and what doesn’t, and how to move forward with confidence and success.