Fresh Fruit Workshop: sooooooft play (hard work?): A porcelain handbuilding workshop

24.09.26, 6-8pm. Free. For 18-30s.

Inviting participants to respond to Eva Rothschild’s sculpture series Soft Play and film Safe, 2026, this porcelain handbuilding workshop will make use of intuitive and embodied sculpting methods to create playful, abstract sculptures.

We often associate porcelain with fragility, as well as a gendered and racialised performance of femininity. But in its wet clay state, it is soft, slippery, and highly malleable. Drawing on Rothschild’s thinking about gendered modes of engaging with objects in public space, we’ll shape and stretch wet porcelain to create emotional artefacts of ‘gender performance’ and bodily experience. We’ll think about queerness, masculinity, and femininity, finding potential for gender disobedience and play in experiencing the soft and slippery.

As tactility comes to the fore, participants are encouraged to respond more to feeling than an attempt to create pre-existing forms; the potential structural collapse of these objects can become interesting stories to tell, too. At the end of the workshop, we’ll stage a mini exhibition of our work, plotting our objects in space together.

This workshop especially welcomes queer and trans participants.

Xuanlin Tham is a Singaporean writer, curator, and maker based in Edinburgh, keenly interested in the (collective) body and desire. Their book Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene explores the sex scene’s capacity to interrupt the violences of capitalism, and is out with 404 Ink. They programme at Take One Action, an arts organisation harnessing the transformative power of film and storytelling for social and environmental justice in Scotland and beyond. As an independent curator and facilitator, they have worked with Glasgow Short Film Festival, Queer East, Rhubaba, and the Edinburgh Art Festival. Xuanlin’s writing on film and culture has been published in e–flux, British GQ, i-D, Little White Lies, and AnOther Magazine, among others.

Access

• Our building has step-free access and is wheelchair accessible via a lift.

• All of our toilets and gender neutral.

• During events and workshops, we can facilitate a quiet space if required.

• We have sensory backpacks available.

• Further access information can be found at the link below:

www.fruitmarket.co.uk/accessibility/

If you have any specific access requirements that you’d like to tell us about when you’re booking a Fresh Fruit workshop or event, please let us know at info@fruitmarket.co.uk

Fresh Fruit is made possible with funding from the Garfield Weston Foundation and William Grant Foundation.