Clay Handbuilding Workshop

Saturday, Sept 28th (pickup TBD)
9am - 11am (EST)
Registration is limited to 15

Join us for a Saturday morning clay handbuilding workshop with our dear friend and Ojai-based ceramicist Hilary Walsh. 

This beginner-friendly class will explore handbuilding to create spice dishes, salt cellars, jewelry catchalls and decorative objet using coiling, pinching, and slab techniques. These methods are essential to form-making and remain the same as those used by early peoples to create primitive forms of pottery found all across Mezo, African, Hellenic, and Middle Eastern cultures.

Participants will create 1-3 pieces, depending on complexity, in their choice of black clay or reddish brown terracotta. Completed pieces will be fired off-site with no glazing and available for pickup the week of 10/1. Participants may also have their pieces mailed at request.

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Informed by an interest in raw materials, ancestral forms, the female figure, and birds, Hilary Walsh uses ceramics and sculpture to create objects as both things of beauty and representations of cultural motifs. Working within age-old modalities like hand coiling and carving clay while using primitive tools, and while using resources thoughtfully and responsibly, Hilary looks backwards as a means of looking forward. This approach is deeply place-based and simultaneously is informed and inspired by traditions and practices from around the globe. Hilary is a California born native, based in Ojai, raised on the east coast. Upon graduation from college in NY, Walsh spend twenty plus years with a career in fashion photography with strong side passion for ceramics.  After a decade of ceramics based classes and workshops, she made the break from photography to full time clay in 2022. 

View more of Hilary’s work at @hilarybwalsh

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