Hand-built Pottery with Texture

Using simple techniques of pinch, coil, and slab forming students are able to create a variety of pieces including cups, bowls, and more.  Natural objects are used to imprint into the surfaces creating designs.  Sculpture techniques are demonstrated as a way to enhance each pot.  The pottery is bisque fired, and then painted with colorful glazes.  Once fired again, the pots are functional, durable lasting works of art. 

Clay Instruments

Clay has long been used as a material to create sounds.  At a basic level we can make rattles and shakers of all different sizes and shapes!  The rattles contain clay beads in varying sizes and quantities, giving each one a different sound.  As time and skill allows, horns, drums, xylophones, and flutes are all possibilities.  Finishing options for the instruments are building a primitive pit fire, or painting with colorful glazes or acrylic paints.  

Primitive Pit Firing

This firing can be combined with a Hand-building or Clay Instrument lesson.

Together the group will create a pit to contain all their pottery and combustible materials.  Depending on the site and resources available, the “pit” can be built above ground with bricks, or dug into the earth.  Each participant will wrap his/her pot in different combustible materials, and place it in the pit amongst sawdust, hay, and woodchips.  Small pieces of wood are added on top and lit on fire.  Several hours later the pots can be taken out.  Each pot comes out with unique smoke patterns and surfaces effects.

Build a wood-fired earthen oven, 

and other outdoor cob sculptures

Clay is combined with sand and chopped straw to create a natural building material that has been used in many parts of the world.  Cob is a fun, easy, versatile material to work with.  Different finishing plasters can be created, making outdoor, free standing sculptures a possibility.  Cob can also be applied to vertical surfaces to create beautiful murals on the outside walls of existing structures. 

Building, firing, and baking in an earthen oven is a rewarding experience!  The oven is built over a woven stick form, or simply a dome of sand.  Cob is applied in thick layers, giving the oven a great insulating and structural wall.  The fun doesn’t stop there!  Further layers of cob can be applied and sculpted by hand, turning the oven into an animal, or giving it texture and design.