Winter/Spring Collaboration: Woodfiring Ceramics Workshops with Salmon Creek Farm
Stay tuned! 2025 workshops will open for applications in October 2024!
(Hint: For your planning, we’re tentatively looking at the latter part of Feb. and a new month-long sess in April)
In these immersive workshops with Cider Creek founders Nick Schwartz and Jess Thompson, we’ll make objects using primary local materials: native clay, salvaged wood as fuel for the kiln, our own hands, and the natural time of elemental processes. We’ll discuss how to source ideas in fundamental ways: daily use, ecological decision-making, site-specific responses to place, and lived experience. We’ll share respite from the exponential source material in digital, urban, academic, and consumer culture, and instead tune into the innate possibilities embodied in raw materials, process, and the land itself.
Participants will stay up the hill at the historic Back to the Land commune known as Salmon Creek Farm, lovingly restored and stewarded since 2014 by artist and architect Fritz Haeg. We’re so excited to join Fritz and the SCF community in a larger conversation about land-based, shared creative activity. SCF “continues the legacy of the original ‘70’s commune, entering a new chapter as a long-term art project shaped by many hands, a sort of queered commune-farm-homestead-sanctuary-school hybrid”. Cider Creek and Salmon Creek share a vision of giving people the opportunity to sink into tangible experience, with hand-crafted, comfortable living; a sense of community; and a connection with the natural environment.
Clay responds to whatever variety of life experiences we bring to it. Our workshops are open to all levels, from total beginner to advanced, non-artist and artist, all occupations, ages, and varieties of life experience. We welcome humans of all orientations and origins, striving to make Cider Creek Collective a safe, supportive space for everyone to enjoy making art.
The Workshop:
For the first few days, Jess and Nick will demonstrate techniques in the studio, working back and forth between the potter’s wheel and handbuilding, exploring both utilitarian and sculptural forms. You’ll have plenty of both guided and open time to experiment with the material, and to request demonstrations specific to your interests. We’ll make space for slow time, observing and responding to the pace of natural processes. Even the weather will come into play, as the moisture in your work responds to the climate and influences your path forward.
After a few days in the studio, you’ll load your dry work into the wood kiln and join the collaborative effort to heat it up slowly, allowing the fire to decorate your pieces with patterns of melting wood ash and flame. The kiln will provide a warm 2400 degree nucleus during the chilly month of January.
As we tend the fire in shifts around the clock, we’ll enter “kiln time”, a circular schedule tuned to process rather than external obligations. You may find yourself abandoning traditional time, in favor of the age-old occupation of sitting by the fire with good company. There will be opportunities for quiet contemplative overnight or early morning shifts, and as the day goes on, neighbors and locals often stop by to check out the kiln, usually with food or drink to share.
The kiln will take 3 days to cool, during which time you can take space to enjoy Salmon Creek Farm and the local area, make a few more things in the studio, or accompany us on visits to other local studios and kiln sites.
Two Week Schedule:
4 days/wk, 10am-5pm, 1 hr lunch (6 hrs instruction/work time)
Participants can stay or return to work in the studio anytime 24/7.
Week 1:
Tuesday-Thursday: Making in the studio, demonstrations, conversation, begin loading
Friday: Finish drying and loading work, kiln lighting ceremony
Friday evening-Tuesday evening: Firing
Optional weekend kiln shifts Saturday-Sunday
Week 2:
Monday: Firing, discussions about firing, possibly more demos
Tuesday: Firing, end firing with final stoke in the evening
Wednesday-Friday: Cooling
Wednesday-Thursday: Optional making, viewing CCC collection, visiting other kilns/studios: Cliff Glover, Table Mt kiln, etc.
Friday afternoon or Saturday 11am unloading
Each participant can fill between 2.5-3.5 cubic feet of space in the kiln, and you can bring bisqueware if you’d like. You may wish to continue working with clay throughout the firing. One 25 lb. bag of clay is included, and more is available for purchase at $15-20/bag. We’ll do an optional bisque/electric kiln firing at the end of the two weeks, so you can take home work that doesn’t make it into the wood kiln.
Applications for this program have closed for 2024. We’ll begin reviewing applications for 2025 later this year, so check back if you’re interested. We look forward to working with you!