Visiting Artist Workshop: Hand Turned Ceramics with Paul Briggs

Hand Turned Ceramics is an intermediate 2-day immersion into pinch-forming vessels. In this workshop participants will learn to move clay in a fashion similar to how it is pulled up on the wheel by using only their hands. Primarily, much patience will be needed to learn this technique and experience with pinch-forming and/or other clay experience is needed. Hand turned ceramics will take students beyond the usual 3″ pinch-formed pot as participants will learn to pinch up to 5lbs of clay, growing a pot from one ball of clay without adding or subtracting any material. Functional ware will be prioritized.

Tools to bring:

Any throwing or handbuilding tools that you like and are accustomed to using will be helpful to bring for the workshop. Clay will be provided.

There will be a break for lunch both days.  Feel free to bring your own lunch or visit one of the many restaurants within walking distance.   

About the Instructor

Paul Briggs was born in Beacon, NY and grew up in the Hudson Valley area of New York state. He was one of those kids who doodled all the time, enrolled in various art classes and began working with clay as a 9th grader. Ceramics quickly became the one place where his attention was not disturbed. His affinity for pinch-forming clay developed while the art director of a summer camp in Bushkill, PA. His thinking about art objects as material shapes with meaning began as an undergraduate at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Over his circuitous life journey Paul has studied and taught education, ceramics, and theology, earning his PhD at the Pennsylvania State University and his MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA.

Paul works primarily with pinch-forming and slab building processes and overall his work is about art making as inner development, broadly understood. He creates distinctive, high relief pinch-formed ceramic vessels and penetrating slab-built sculptural forms, both genres often have interior space. Paul is an Assistant Professor of Ceramic Art at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University.