Announcing our first 2025 Woodfiring Workshop with Salmon Creek Farm!
Sunday, February 16th to Saturday, March 1st 2025 (2 weeks)
Applications due: November 3rd
* We will also be offering a month-long workshop from April 1st to 30th, 2025, applications open in January.
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 any life experiences you bring to it. Our goal is to cultivate a community environment that is as welcoming, responsive, and compassionate as the material itself. Our workshops are open to all, total beginner and advanced, non-artist and artist, all occupations, ages, and kinds of 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 making techniques in the studio, working back and forth between the potter’s wheel and handbuilding, utilitarian and sculptural and open to requests. You’ll have time to experiment with the material, 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, we’ll load our work into the kiln and begin 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 February.
As we tend the firing in shifts around the clock, we’ll enter “kiln time”, a circular schedule tuned to the rhythmic breathing of the fire. You may find yourself abandoning traditional time and ambitions in favor of just sitting by the fire, in good company, tuning into the rhythm of the process. There will be opportunities for quiet contemplative overnight or early morning shifts, and throughout the day into the evening, neighbors and locals often stop by to check on the kiln with food or drink to share.
The kiln will take 3 days to cool, during which time you can enjoy Salmon Creek Farm and the local area on your own or join in visits to 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:
Sun: Arrival at Salmon Creek Farm
Mon: Orientation and settling in
Tues- Thurs: Making, demonstrations, begin loading
Fri: Finish drying and loading work, kiln lighting
Fri evening - Tues evening: Firing
Optional weekend kiln shifts Sat-Sun
Week 2:
Mon: Firing, possibly more demos
Tues: End firing with final stoke in the evening
Wed- Fri: Cooling
Wed- Thurs: Optional visits to local studios
Fri afternoon: Unloading
Sat AM: Departure
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. One 25 lb. bag of clay is included, and more is available for purchase at $25/bag.
Applications for this program are open thru November 3rd. We receive a large number of applications, so participants will be notified within a few weeks after the deadline if you’re being offered a place in the workshop.
The Cider Creek tuition for the clay workshop is $1000. Fees for housing are handled separately thru Salmon Creek Farm. Head over to https://salmoncreekfarm-commune.org/Wood-Fire-Ceramics-Workshops for more info, or go straight to the application at https://form.jotform.com/SalmonCreekFarm/2025-Ceramics.
Thank you for your interest and we look forward to seeing your application!