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Ceramics - Slab built and Slip-painted Ceramics – Responding to Place - 5 Day course with Anna Lambert.

Sunday, 15 September 2024 17:00
Friday, 20 September 2024 14:05

Coombe Farm Studios (map)

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Slab built and Slip-painted Ceramics – Responding to Place

Following Anna’s sold out courses last year we’re delighted to be inviting her back to Coombe in 2023. Anna has been a firm favourite potter of ours for many many years and her work is treasured by many.

Working from the gardens and landscape surrounding Coombe Farm, learn how to gather visual information and use drawing to develop designs for simple slab built ceramic platters, bowls, and cylinders. During this course you will practice techniques for use with tonal and coloured slips: relief embossing with lino, hand cut paper stencils, developing textures and sgraffitto drawing. Each participant will be encouraged to find a combination of techniques that appeals to them.

You will build a series of small hand-built forms, followed by a longer study to develop ideas, using drawn and relief designs.

There will be practical demonstrations for each technique and group discussion to encourage the generation of ideas and problem solving. Individual practical instruction will be tailored to each student’s needs as the project develops.

Techniques covered will include working with soft and leatherhard slabs; painting with multiple layers of slips; making hand cut stencils, simple lino cutting; use of texture; producing a good finish on rims and feet.

Anna has been a full-time maker of handbuilt earthenware ceramics since 1980. In 1989 she moved with her husband, painter David AP Thomas, to North Yorkshire.They now share a studio, Junction Workshop, in an old shop next to the Burberry Mill in Airedale. Her many solo exhibitions include Contemporary Ceramics, London, The Scottish Gallery, Edinburgh and Galerie Terra Viva, France and she has exhibited extensively throughout Europe and the USA.

Anna builds her work from a white earthenware mixed clay, using a variety of techniques including slab-building, using both soft and firm slabs, modelling and painting with slips.

Her ideas reflect an interest in place, exploring narratives relating to land and water management in her locality and the regeneration of orchards. Inspired by new nature writing, she engages with a common language beyond pastoral sentimentality, combining drawing with abstract qualities of pots, their spaces, edges, and surfaces.

Anna studied at Bath Academy of Art (BA Hons 3D design) and University of Central Lancashire (MA Ceramics) and is a Fellow (and currently Membership Secretary) of the Craft Potters Association.

As well as working in clay, Anna loves to cook, garden, walk, and draw in the landscape.

MATERIALS LIST FOR THIS COURSE

If you have them, bring pottery tools, an apron, drawing materials, a sketchbook, scissors and lino cutting tools if you have them.

There will be a charge of £5 per kilo of clay to include materials and firing to stoneware temperature in an electric kiln. Finished work can be sent on for a small charge.