2025 Workshops & Demos
Our next round of workshops, demonstrations, and artist talks with visiting and local artists begins in February 2025. All our workshops include clay, slips + stains + glazes as needed, and bisque firing of workshop pieces. Learn more below about what’s on offer this spring!
Email us with workshop inquiries and sign-up requests – events@berkeleypottersstudio.org
Workshop registration and payment is completed via your Potters’ Studio account – if you’re not a current Member or Student, please go HERE to create an account.
Introduction to Soda Firing with Josie Rovegno
February 4-12 (see full schedule below)
Join this introductory workshop and gain hands-on training in the fundamentals of soda firing!
Josie will train you in safety and care of the kiln and equipment and will guide you in preparing and glazing your bisqueware, making wadding and cone packs, and loading and firing. Each participant will get 1 cubic foot of firing space.
This workshop firing will be at cone 9/10 reduction with oxidation strike and sprayed soda and is good for glazes, raw clay, and flashing slips.
Tuesday, Feb. 4, 5:30–8:30 PM: Introductory lecture
Saturday + Sunday, Feb. 8–9: Prepare work + load and fire the kiln
Wednesday, Feb. 12, 5:30–8:30 PM: Unload, potluck, and discussion
Mugs by Josie Rovegno
To register, email events@berkeleypottersstudio.org
PS Member + PS Student registration OPEN NOW!
General public registration opens Jan. 13. Limited spots available!
Scholarships are available. Email events@berkeleypottersstudio.org for more info
COST: $425 (PS Members & PS Students: $375)
Sculptural + Ornamental Slip-Trailing with Grace Potter
February 22-23, 10 AM–5 PM
ADDITIONAL WORKSHOP DETAILS COMING SOON!
Working primarily in ceramics, Grace Potter makes intricate sculptures that consider her relationship to the more-than-human world through the lenses of ecology and spiritual inquiry. Her work often references sites of reverence: reliquaries, mausoleums and cathedrals, as a tool for investigating hierarchies and value systems. Animals, plants and fungi depicted in the work carry metaphors for personal narratives as well as archetypal myths. She approaches making as a ritual, illuminating the mystical in the mundane and venerating the subjects of her sculptures through time-consuming processes and meticulous craft. Accumulated textures and patterns generate surreal compositions, reflecting the disorienting complexity of the natural world and her temporal place within it. Themes of interconnection, transformation and cycles of life and death guide her practice.
Grace (b. 1996, Knoxville, TN) is a visual artist who grew up in rural Appalachia. She received her BFA in Ceramics with minors in Art History and Anthropology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Grace has completed two Post-Baccalaureates in Ceramics, one at Louisiana State University and the other at the University of Oklahoma. Grace has spent time working at the Mendocino Art Center, Cider Creek Collective in Albion, CA, Salmon Creek Farm in Albion, CA, Good Hope Pottery in Trelawny, Jamaica, and IaRex l’Atelier in St. Raphael, France. She is currently living and working in Mendocino, CA.
To register, email events@berkeleypottersstudio.org
PS Member + PS Student and general public registration OPEN NOW!
COST: $345 (PS Members & PS Students: $295)
Low-Fire Soda with Tom Jaszczak
March 7-11 (see full schedule below)
learn how to incorporate poured slip and develop rich surface and illustrative elements on soda-fired pots!
This workshop will focus on a variety of surface solutions using slip and underglazes. We will be making red earthenware slipware and firing in a soda kiln to cone 2, but the techniques demonstrated will be applicable to many firing solutions and temperatures. The workshop will end with some wet clay demonstrations that will use multiple forming techniques.
Tom approaches clay and making with a fearlessness with failing (failure is learning) and is always rethinking the beauty of material and color.
WORKSHOP SCHEDULE
Late Jan/Early FEB TBA: Zoom lecture and demo (recorded) about slip application and decoration techniques. Slips and clay will be available to all participants on registration starting in mid-January
Friday, March 7, 9 AM – 4 PM: Demos and hands-on work in surface techniques
Saturday, March 8, 10 AM – 5 PM: Demos and hands-on work in decoration and glazing + loading the kiln
Sunday, March 9: Fire the kiln off and spray soda + demo “making atmospheric pots in an electric kiln.”
Tuesday morning, March 11: Unload, potluck, and discussion
Originally from Minnesota, Tom received a BA in Visual Art and a BS in Biology with a minor in Chemistry from Bemidji State University. He was a summer resident and a long-term resident at the Archie Bray Foundation. In the fall of 2015 Tom began a 3-year residency with his wife Maggie Jaszczak at the Penland School of Craft. In 2018 Tom and Maggie put down permanent roots in Shafer, MN where they live in a farmhouse and work in a barn style studio. Tom has received several awards and honors including, a Jerome Projects Grant, ECRAC Essential Artist Award, Emerging Artist Award through NCECA, as well as Ceramics Monthly, Lincoln and Lil Street Fellowships through the Archie Bray Foundation and in the summer of 2014, Tom was an Honored Maker at the Maker’s Faire at the White House in Washington D.C under the Obama presidency.
Tom’s current body of work are a range of pots made of red earthenware that explore minimalism and are finished with an experimental surface solution firing to cone 2 in a soda fired atmosphere.
To register, email events@berkeleypottersstudio.org
PS Member + PS Student and general public registration OPEN NOW!
COST: $500 (PS Members & PS Students: $425)
Exploring Layered + Colored Surfaces with Taylor Sijan
April 11–13, 10 AM–5 PM
DIVE INTO COLOR AND TEXTURE USING SLIPS + UNDERGLAZES AND LEARN HOW TO INCORPORATE INCISED + RAISED SURFACE DECORATION AND STENCILS INTO YOUR SURFACE COMPOSITIONS!
“I craft richly decorated, functional pottery. Each piece is a confluence of things I find beautiful–asymmetrical compositions, evocative colors, botanical imagery, and fine details–expressed within the parameters of objects intended for active participation in someone’s life.
Balancing comfortable utility and expressive aesthetics is an interesting challenge to navigate because these pots are designed to be used, but paradoxically, decoration is often a signal to someone to not touch. To get people to overcome initial cautiousness, I inspire curiosity through complexity and mystery by selectively hiding and/or highlighting the many techniques I use throughout my process. I begin with throwing, altering, and handbuilding to construct soft forms that are then adorned with layered ornamentation. The surface compositions are a collage of contrasting organic and geometric motifs that are painted, slip trailed, carved, and stamped. By weaving raised and recessed methods of mark-making asymmetrically around the vessels, I cultivate visual and tactile appeal to encourage a viewer’s eyes and hands to roam around the form, into the interior, and underneath.”
bring leathersoft and bone dry work or we will be working with simple tiles to learn the techniques
To register, email events@berkeleypottersstudio.org
PS Member + PS Student advance registration opens Jan. 16
General public registration opens Jan. 23