Announcing our first Month-long Woodfiring Workshop with Salmon Creek Farm
Monday, March 31st thru Friday, April 25th
Applications due: Saturday, February 1st
In this immersive workshop with Cider Creek founders Nick Schwartz and Jess Thompson, we’ll live on the land, make things, and fire a catenary-arch wood-soda kiln. We’ll harvest and process native clays and play with glaze recipes using local materials. With plenty of time to come and go from the studio, you can pace yourself and explore how it feels to settle into local life here on the coast.
We’ll source ideas in elemental ways: daily use, ecological decision-making, site-specific responses to place. We’ll share respite from digital, urban, and consumer culture, and tune into intrinsic possibilities in raw materials, process, and the land.
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 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 folks 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:
During the first week, you’ll be harvesting local clay and glaze materials from Cider Creek, Salmon Creek, and local riverbeds. 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.
Then you’ll have plenty of time to live on the land in Albion and experience the local environment and communities, coming and going from the studio. You can experiment with the material, learning the process of harvesting and refining primary clay, moving at the pace of natural processes. We’ll learn how to make for the kiln, and for the special atmosphere created by wood and soda firing. Even the weather will come into play, as the moisture in your work responds to the climate and influences your path forward.
In the 3rd week of the workshop, we’ll load our work into the kiln and 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 as the days get longer and warmer and fruit trees start flowering around us.
We’ll tend the firing in shifts around the clock, entering the circular clock of “kiln time”. You can choose what times of day work for you to sit with the kiln, and generally abandon traditional time and ambitions in favor of sitting by the fire, tuning into the process.
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.
Applications for this program are open thru February 1st. Participants will be notified within a few days after the deadline if you’re being offered a place in the workshop.
The Cider Creek tuition for the clay workshop is $1600. 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!