Jun 15

Glazing & Surface Decoration Techniques Workshop

w/visiting artist, w/Charlotte Deason Robillard $80

Students will learn about a variety of ceramic surface decoration techniques. We will provide each student with a bisqued tumbler that they’ll decorate and glaze during the workshop; students are also welcome to bring a piece of their own bisqued work. We’ll go over masking and resistance methods, overlapping glazes, painting with underglazes, using stencils, and techniques for getting clean precise surface designs as well as more organic freehand designs. No previous ceramics experience is required.

Saturday 2-6p

Location: Ilwaco Artworks

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Nick Delffs: Presented by Sou’wester Arts

Nick Delffs grew up in Mendocino County, a lawless stretch of coastline that’s hard to get to and, for many, hard to escape. Nick did — emerging in the early aughts as the frontman for Portland band The Shaky Hands, whose sharp, jittery rock was anchored by Nick’s quavering vocals and questing lyrics. The Shaky Hands were mainstays of Portland on the verge of a major shift, and they rode that shift a while, signing to Kill Rock Stars and touring internationally with some of the bigger names in indie rock. But a hiatus in 2011 became indefinite and Nick Delffs was once again cast into the world: working as a sideman, releasing solo records, doing manual labor, going deeper into his spiritual practices, and, crucially, becoming a father.

Becoming a parent can affect different artists in different ways. Nick rode that change with surpassing grace and maturity. 2017’s Redesign, his first full-length under his own name, reflected the transition. In “Song for Aja”, Nick touched on other concerns familiar to those who follow his work: love of the natural world; longing for spiritual and physical connection; the desire to suffer with meaning and exult with abandon, to embrace somehow the world in its maddening contradictions and find the unity at the core.

Childhood Pastimes, his second release on Mama Bird Recording Co., is both more focused and, despite being technically an EP, more ambitious. It’s a four-song cycle — one song with many movements or four songs that bleed into one another, depending on how you hear it — that can be viewed either as a personal journey or an archetypal passage of a human being through four discrete stages: roughly, the movement from childhood innocence into adolescent adventure (The Escape); the sudden immersion into a life of discovery and excitement (The Dream); the first experience of romantic love, followed by the onset of heartbreak, dissolution, breakdown of self (The Affair); the emergence into a new way of thinking, a fresh perspective that encompasses all the suffering and joy into a balanced whole (The Outside).

Nick plays nearly all of the instruments here and the result is a unified aesthetic, born ultimately of his deep-seated love of rhythm: the thrum and throb of the acoustic guitars, the percussive melodic bang of the elegantly-crafted piano lines, and always, always the insistent, driving drums, propelling the record, and the listener, on this journey as the four tracks bleed into one another, one body, one blood, one beating heart. The concept of four songs that are really one suite of music requires a sure hand, and Nick’s never shakes: the way the songs blend together while retaining their distinctiveness — from the poppy exaltation of “The Escape” to the cold intensity, almost like an acoustic Kraftwerk, of “The Affair” — shows a songwriter and musician who has fully grown into his powers.

Those who have followed Nick’s career may see this as a culmination of years and years of honing and fine-tuning his bountiful gifts, and wonder with delight what might come next. For those who haven’t listened to Nick before, Childhood Pastimes is the perfect entry point, a distillation of what’s come before and the promise of a new beginning.

June 18 & 19

Natural Pigment Making Workshop

w/Laura Wright $100

Natural Pigment Making: Local Foraging to Create Plant-Based Watercolors. In this workshop, we will make watercolor paints from plants found in the area around Sou’wester. During day 1, we will ethically forage local plants and begin the process of extracting their color.  We will also prepare a container for our finished paints.  In the second day, participants will learn how to filter out pigment and use it to create watercolor.  Each participant will leave with a set of watercolor paints created from the colors of the Sou’wester landscape.

• Saturday 2-6p
• Sunday 12-4p

Location: Sou’wester Lodge Pavilion

Jun 22

Making Miniatures

w/visiting artist, w/Korin Schneider $70

Come play with clay and channel your youthful spirit during this lighthearted hand building workshop. Create a collection of mini sculptures and keep them for yourself or give them as tiny treats for friends and family. The options are endless so let’s think big and make small! We will learn the basics of hand sculpting clay including attaching pieces, texturizing and smoothing surfaces, and decorating with underglaze. Each participant will be able to make as many pieces as they can fit into a small box provided.

• Saturday 2-6p

Location: Ilwaco Artworks

Jun 29 & 30

Ceramic Charms, Beads & Good Luck Icons

w/visiting artist, w/Emily Wright $120

Create meaningful and magical symbols for you and your loved ones. Carve your own icon of good luck, cast it in plaster, and make beaded charms for yourself and others.

Saturday 2-6p

Sunday 12-4p

Location: Ilwaco Artworks

Live Music: Generifus

6/29. 8. FREE

Altered Vessels Workshop w/Gelindo L. Ferrin. July 9th & 10th, 3-6p.

Whether you are beginning to explore clay or have some experience, this 2 – day workshop will give you several basic ideas and demo examples of ways to alter the forms you make, either wheel-thrown or hand-built, with different surface decoration options and/or forming your clay projects with simple tools and techniques. The first day will be spent planning and making and the second will be spent building, trimming and finishing your projects. You will take home 2- 3 projects depending on your style.

Bio:

My work has been inspired by the materials and tools available to me, natural environments, and what the materials allow. My style is rather loose, and with a little planning it is always exciting to see what comes forth from the clay and other materials at hand. I am now in the process of reconstructing a creative environment at home after teaching in public education for nearly 30 years. I recently sold my public studio on Bainbridge Island and look forward to doing workshops, teaching and doing demos for creative enrichment. rollingbayclay.com

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Traditional (ceramic) Syrian Water Vessels Workshop w/Leila Piazza. 3-6p. $110.

Learn to hand-build and decorate an “ibreeq,” a traditional Syrian water vessel with handle and spout. We will use coiling and joining techniques to create our vessels, then return on day two to carve out decorations. This is an all-levels class that will cover several pottery techniques as well as some background about Syrian pottery design and decoration. Bring any hand tools you like (especially for carving), but there will also be a selection of tools provided.

Bio – Leila Piazza is a Syrian American writer, potter, and chef. She is dedicated to preserving Syrian culture and history through writing, pottery, cooking, and music. Her pottery work encompasses a wide variety of techniques, including throwing, slab building, and coiling. She focuses on functional pottery, with an emphasis on forms, styles, and decorations unique to her culture, from ancient and modern times, including Islamic calligraphy and traditional sgraffito (carving) decoration and glaze work. When she’s not making pottery, Leila is writing about Syrian American experiences, working on a play, improving her guitar playing, cooking for friends and family, and gathering old stories from her parents’ youth.

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Live Music: Lindsay Clark and Half Shadow

7/20. 8p. Free

Lindsay Clark:

Lindsay Clark finds balance between traditional folk, English folk, country and her own version of experimental folk that seems to come from within. With influences ranging from the Beach Boys, Elizabeth Cotton, Joni Mitchell, Appalachian folk, her classical upbringing and her father’s record collection, she blends many worlds into a uniquely warm sound. She has carved out a unique and vibrant place as an artist with her penchant for poetry, rich harmony and a style of self-taught fingerpicking influenced by Nick Drake, John Fahey, and others.

Originally from the small gold rush town of Nevada City, CA, she now resides in Portland, OR. She has shared the stage with musicians such as Alela Diane, Adam Torres, Nat Baldwin (Dirty Projectors), Ryan Francesconi (Joanna Newsom), Jolie Holland, and Michael Hurley. Her sound has been described as “folk with angelic vocals washing over smooth edges” (1859 Magazine), with her recent album Carpe Noctem called “stunning” by NPR Music. The album features William Tyler, Alela Diane, Sage Fisher (Dolphin Midwives), & Andy Rayborn (Paper Gates) and was engineered, co-produced, co-arranged with Jeremy Harris (Fruit Bats / Hand Habits). She has also recently contributed to Michael Hurley’s latest release, Time of the Foxgloves.

Half Shadow:

For the past decade Half Shadow, the midnight-blue songwriting moniker of Portland’s Jesse Carsten, has been unfurling an enigmatic, windswept music: equal parts earthen folk and cosmic rock and roll, with a primal pop experimentalism seeping from the edges. Wedding an expansive, transcendent poetics to a fiercely home-spun aesthetic, Carsten creates joyful, eclectic song-collages that embrace the experimental singer-songwriter tradition of the Pacific Northwest while enfolding an array of canonical art-voicings; songs range from abstract finger-picked poems to heart-tugged acapella treaties and repetitive art-rock incantations. Half Shadow’s performances are recognized as deep feeling, immersive events. The Portland Mercury has praised Carsten’s shows as “invariably powerful, full of wonder, and unlike anything else.”

Following a steady string of homemade cassettes, CD-Rs, and digital one-off releases, Carsten birthed the first fully formed Half Shadow LP in 2019, Dream Weather Its Electric Song, which was hailed by Antiquated Future as “a carefully thought-out work…of poetic devotionals to the natural world, the subconscious, other realms.” The record was celebrated for its ability to work tangible magic. As Queen City Sounds put it, Dream Weather deconstructs “familiar songwriting styles, bringing the logical mind into alternate pathways of operating.” Following Dream Weather, on which Half Shadow toured in late 2019, and which after followed the world-crashing pandemic, Carsten released At Home With My Candles (Bud Tapes/Dove Cove Records), an album of mythopoetic paeans to the domestic uncanny, the mysterious and unseen worlds experienced at home. Expanding the project’s intimate poetics into something more sonically encompassing, Carsten conjured intimate folk song epics, lo-fi dirges, and primal pop experiments that effectively connect the domestic and the cosmic, the ordinary and the surreal. The album displays, according to Various Small Flames, “an uncanny marriage between personal insight and a wider mystical experience” and was celebrated by a small but fervent cadre of international listeners in the know.

Carsten’s non-linear and environmental dream-lyrics place him in the company of like-minded contemporaries such as Mega Bog’s Erin Birgy, Yves Jarvis, and Ruth Garbus, for whom songwriting is an attempt at surreal levels of poetic feeling. Having been called “one of Portland’s best kept secrets,” it is paradoxically Half Shadow’s mystery-inspired, DIY ethos that spirits Carsten’s ever-evolving project out of the home-recordist’s cave and onto more illuminated stages. When it does, Half Shadow is ready to wrap listeners in the dark, sparkling hues and mossy undergrowth that have become the poetic trademark of this singular undertaking.