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Colored Clay: Layers Revealed – Workshop

By naomilin on January 16, 2022 in

When:

March 19, 2022 @ 9:00 am – March 20, 2022 @ 12:00 pm

2022-03-19T09:00:00-04:00

2022-03-20T12:00:00-04:00

Where:

Wheelhouse Clay Center
48 Harmony Place
Brattleboro
Vermont 05301

Cost:

185.00

Contact:

Shari Zabriskie

Weekend Workshop:
Colored Clay: Layers Revealed

with Naomi Lindenfeld

Saturday and Sunday March 19 and 20, 2020 9am – Noon each day

Natural objects with patterned imagery surround us in the environment. These will provide inspiration for making pieces from layered, colored clay. It is an exceptional medium for expressing the beauty of fluid movement, the effects of water and wind that transform shells, rock and wood. We will wedge stains into porcelain and layer the different colors into a block. By slicing, rolling, pinching and carving, multi-dimensional effects are revealed. The colored clay integrates the designs with functional or sculptural forms, connecting hand with water and earth.

Two projects will be presented using layered block: wrapped slab cups and pinched and carved bowls. Prior experience with clay is helpful but not essential.

$185 includes materials, glazing and firing plus sessions for glazing, picking up finished work and discussion. $10 extra charge if instruction in glazing is needed or to have the instructor glaze your pieces.

email naomilin@sover.net to register!

Dialogue: Lindenfeld + Lindenfeld

Vermont Crafts Council Open Studio Tour – Orchard St. Pottery Pavilion

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EVENTS

Artist Statement

I grew up with my mother's loom in our family's living room. Not many years later I ended up with clay carving tools and a rolling pin in my own ceramics studio. The pairings of work in this show exemplify the influences of my mother's work on me and have served as an opportunity to both grow creatively and to honor my mother and her life's work.

Lore Kadden Lindenfeld (1921 - 2010) emigrated from Germany to the U.S. in the late 1930s. She attended Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1940s and was a student of both Josef and Anni Albers. Inspired by the Alberses and the Bauhaus school tradition, she worked as a textile designer for the New York fashion industry followed by a career as a weaver, fiber collage artist and as a weaving and art history teacher on the college level.

I grew up hearing riveting stories of Black Mountain College, its avant-garde, experimental environment and brilliant, unique personalities. As well, I was exposed to many artists and craftspeople during my childhood and took my first pottery class with a friend of my mother's. I responded to the immediacy of clay more than what appeared to be the tedium of threading warps on a loom.

While working on a degree in ceramics from Boston University's Program in Artisanry, I discovered the Japanese technique, Nerikomi, of layering colored clays to create patterns. I have been captivated by exploring many ways of working with colored clay ever since. I have also come to realize that my method of working with clay - the sense of movement, abstract graphic quality, nature-themed imagery and vivid color - echoes my mother's textiles. In designing work for this show, I was first more drawn to my mother's fiber collage work than her weavings, as a closer match for my own techniques and sensibilities. I later saw that the way I carve into the layers in two directions appear as woven fabric.

It was both fascinating and challenging to interpret a two-dimensional medium within a three-dimensional realm; to not just reproduce my mother's ideas and imagery but to draw inspiration and design the pieces as my own. My hope is that my ceramics, while paying homage to my mother, stand on their own just as her fiber works do.