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.

The Magic of Color Woodcut Prints 3-day workshop w/Charles Spitzack. 3-6p. $130.

Learn how to make colorful multilayered woodblock prints! Using safer oil based water soluble inks (cranfield inks), this process will focus on a simple hand printing technique using multiple plates to create layered colorful prints.

Bio – 

Charles Spitzack (b 1987) is a visual artist, educator, and carpenter living and working in the Pacific Northwest USA. Committed to communal aspirations, equality, labor rights, environmentalism, and leveling the playing field – Spitzack has found woodblock printmaking to be an excellent way to express his thoughts and feelings. www.charlesspitzack.com / @spitzattack on ig

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Kinsey Lee Presented by Sou’wester Arts!

Kinsey Lee is a member of the American indie folk band, The Wild Reeds. The Wild Reeds are known for their beautiful harmonies, poignant lyrics, and captivating performances. Kinsey Lee’s vocals are a central part of The Wild Reeds’ sound. She contributes her distinct voice and songwriting abilities to the band’s repertoire. With 10 years of writing, touring, and performing on her resume she has begun to find her voice as a solo artist. Kinsey recently debuted her first solo track “Lover’s song” recorded by Duff Thompson and Steph Green of Mashed Potato Records. She is currently working on a record as a follow up. Kinsey hopes to be like Bonnie Raitt, Carole King, Brandi Carlile,  and Lucinda Williams when she grows up. Musicians with strong lyrics, true grit, and a heartfelt story to tell. 

Surface Decoration Intensive (Mixed Level) 2-day workshop w/visiting artist, Courtney Murphy.

August 13, 3-6p & August 14, 3-6p. $115

In this class we will explore different surface decorations on greenware working with underglazes. Techniques covered will include sgraffito, carving, paper resist, and image transfers. We will use tiles to try out different techniques, before using these new techniques to create a finished piece.

Bio – 

Courtney Murphy is a studio potter living and working in Missoula, Montana. She studied Ceramics at Oregon College of Art & Craft, graduating in 2004. In 2009 she came to Montana where she completed a two year artist-in-residence at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena. She fell in love with Montana, and after a short term residency at Red Lodge Clay Center, and a long term residency at the Clay Studio of Missoula, she decided to settle in Missoula where she recently finished building a home studio.

Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and has been featured in books and magazines including American Craft, Pottery Making Illustrated, and Ceramics Monthly. In 2011 she was honored to be chosen as an emerging artist by Ceramics Monthly.

Her designs are influenced by folk art, mid-century modern forms and shapes, as well as patterns, textiles and historical pots. www.courtneymurphy.net / @courtneymurphyceramics on ig

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Sculptural Coiled Pots Workshop with Taylor Stefanski. August 20th & 21st, 3-6p. $110.

Learn the basics of hand building through various coil and paddling techniques.

The first day students will learn coil building techniques to build their own pots. The second day folks will learn how to refine the forms, add adornments and some detail color.

Bio – 

Her work is deeply inspired by the sea. Explores ideas of imperfection and honors the nature of the tides through meditative repetition. Expressed in the chosen hand building process – each of their pieces are created primarily using a coil building technique. Where she rolls each coil by hand to create each unique, one of a kind forms.

Graduated from Cornish College of the Arts with a focus on printmaking and sculpture. Their ceramic work is carried in a variety of stores in Seattle, Portland and LA. She currently works and teaches in her studio in Capitol Hill.

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