April - June 26 Weekly handbuilding with clay

This workshop is suitable for beginners and those who have experience working with clay.

Artist Nicky May Bolland will lead weekly sessions exploring hand-building techniques to build our own clay vessels before having the opportunity to learn different surface-design techniques.

The sessions will run from 10.30 - 12.30pm.

The cost per session is £20-40 on a sliding scale (only a small number of tickets at the lowest rate are available) + cost of materials (this will be labelled at the session and charged at the end of your attendance). 

The venue is Birnam Arts

* I take payment on a weekly basis. I live with a chronic health condition which means I can't always manage the things I would like to.  I'll endeavour to go ahead with a session wherever possible and if I can't I will communicate with participants to reschedule, and only where completely necessary, cancel.  I appreciate your commitment to the full block where possible and a commitment to paying for the sessions as promptly as possible.  Sessions which are cancelled will be refunded.  

In the first part of the course we will learn and use the slab or coil building technique to create our vessels. Nicky will guide you through some of the processes and approaches that give the best results with slab, pinch and coil building methodology, including building your forms and finishing surfaces.  In further weeks we will explore some different printing methods to decorate your vessel.  Participants will learn how to get the best results from processes including stencils and mono-printing. 

Following the sessions your pieces will be clear glazed and fired before being available for collection.  Our approach to firing ceramics seeks to minimise the environmental impact - i.e. we try to ensure the kiln is as full as possible and where possible single fire work. For this reason you may have to wait sometime for your final work: we appreciate your patience and understanding on this.

Nicky May Bolland is an inter-disciplinary artist based in Perthshire, with an established visual arts practice combining clay and print-making techniques in novel ways. Nicky's work is concerned with relationships and entanglements: interspecies, inter-generational, inter-cultural. She loves creating work in clay, print-making and other mediums that captures the bold intricacy of the natural world and it's many inter-connections.