What's Included
- 3 work days including demos
- 4 nights shared accommodations
- Brunch, dinner, snacks & drinks
- Visits to local artist's galleries
- Visit to Mudtools
- Evening Fun including Hour Hour & Fireside Movie
Demonstrations
In this demonstration, Donna will explain multiple ways to decorate your pots using an illustration of the flower Snow Drops. She will show you how to carve a rubber stamp and a clay stamp, sgraffito and hand building. Each technique gives your pottery a slightly different feeling enabling you to speak to your audience with a slightly different voice.
Advanced wheel throwing description
Meet the Instructors
Melanie Risch
I work with local materials and wood firing as a continuation of practices humans have engaged in since before the written word. Working this way makes me feel human in a way I find beautiful. I embrace the constraint of localism, using the limits of these materials to deepen my understanding of ceramics and the pottery traditions of this place. I see materials not as passive substances, but as collaborators: the clay’s color and texture shape the marks that emerge, evidence of the making process, and flame and ash from long wood firings leave their own fire marked surfaces on the pots. People have made pots here for a long time, and I am now one of them.
Donna Griffin
Art has always been in Donna’s soul. She has been a pianist for over 50 years and holds a BA in piano. Inspired by her father, a nuclear tool designer before turning to art in his retirement, she took a ceramics class at her community recreation center in Connecticut in 2016, and immediately fell in love with the material and processes. When she moved to Burnsville, North Carolina in 2019, her plan was to start a studio with the moniker of “Mud Puppy Pottery.” However the pandemic put these plans on hold. At the beginning of the pandemic, she read “During this time of quarantine and isolation, learn something new!” So she did! While on her clay hiatus, she began drawing and painting which directly impacted her future clay process. You can see these creations at her studio/gallery. Donna continues to build and expand her work. You will find her in the studio making something new and fun.
