Posted on

Photo(s) of the Week: From Bag of Clay to Handled Tray

This Saturday, we’re thrilled to welcome Courtney Martin back to the Penland clay studio for our third Penland Everywhere live Q&A!

These live events are part of our very first online programs and go hand-in-hand with prerecorded video demonstrations featuring a handful of expert instructors sharing their techniques, tips, and tricks. If Courtney’s Q&A is anything like our first two with Cristina Córdova and David H. Clemons, it will be an hour packed with useful insights, detailed information, and a bit of that Penland camaraderie we’ve all been missing. Sign up now to join the conversation—the Q&A starts at 1 PM ET tomorrow, February 20.

Courtney’s demo takes participants through her steps for creating a handbuilt tray form, complete with her signature cut handles and decorative carving details. Here’s a look at the process in three screenshots taken directly from her hour-long lesson.

15:04—Join the two ends of the coil that will form the walls of the tray.

Potter Courtney Martin in the early stages of making a tray in the Penland clay studio

 

41:32—Mark out the handle openings on the refined tray form.

Courtney Martin marking her tray form with a needle tool

 

59:03—Give the foot of the tray some personality with decorative carving!

Courtney Martin uses a loop tool to carve a geometric pattern into the underside of her clay tray

 

Participants in Courtney’s demo will have 30 days of access to watch, rewatch, and try out her techniques. Register now to give it a try!

For a deeper dive into handbuilding with clay, sign up to join Courtney’s immersive online workshop March 11-13.

Posted on

Penland Everywhere: Online Programming Coming this Winter

We’ve been holding this one in for a long time, and we’re thrilled to finally be able to announce: Penland is going online!

We are planning a series of online programming for you, including online demonstrations with Q&A sessions and immersive online workshops. Our goal is to give students who have never been to Penland an opportunity to experience our unique approach to teaching and learning in community and to give past students a chance to reconnect with the familiar rhythms and spaces of time at Penland. You’ll be able to enjoy the same studios, same expert instruction, and same generous and engaged peers—now in a new format that makes the Penland experience more accessible than ever!

We are not developing these online programs as stand-ins for our on-campus workshops. Rather, they are a way to seize this moment and bring the skill, creativity, inspiration, energy, and focus of a Penland session right to you. Wherever you are in the world, and wherever you are in your artistic journey, we hope you’ll join us to go a little deeper with Penland Everywhere.

Our first demonstrations and workshops will be available in January. Subscribe to Penland newsletters and follow us on Instagram and Facebook to get the details as we release them.

 

This project is funded in part by a grant from South Arts with support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

 

Posted on

Clay Goes Big

Nick Schwartz torching the top of a coil-built pot

The spring clay concentration has been busy preparing pieces for their first firing, and they haven’t been holding back on the scale or the drama. Here, instructor Nick Schwartz uses a torch to stiffen the most recent layer of clay on a sizeable pot he’s building. Below, two more large pots look on. They were collaborations between Nick and local potter Courtney Martin, whose signature geometric resist patterns you can see painted on both pieces.

And here, a fun and gratuitous flame close-up, just because:

closeup of a torch and wet clay pot

 

Save

Save

Save