Clay is beloved for its messy, joyous immediacy, and, of course, for the reward of watching an item transform through firing from clay to ceramic. But many artists work with unfired clay as a way to embrace the material’s fragility and to explore its symbolic associations with fragility, ephemerality and transformation.

In this workshop, participants will honor the Bauhaus spirit of learning by doing and embrace the material possibilities and limitations of unfired clay as a sculptural material in its own right. They will look at some examples of artists — historic and contemporary — who work with unfired clay, and they will go over some simple handbuilding techniques to get everyone up and running. Some alternative methods of construction and finishing the pieces will be introduced as an option for participants to explore.

This program is part of the Wende Bauhaus series, in which local artists lead hands-on classes inspired by the Bauhaus school’s learning-by-doing philosophy and its spirit of experimentation, play, and discovery.

About the teaching artist: Hallie McNeill is an artist and writer currently based in Los Angeles. She received an MFA from the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work examines how desire and aspiration inform our relationships with language and material culture, particularly through acts of self-representation. Focusing on the fragility and arbitrariness of organizational systems, she traces these dynamics both literally—through manufactured conveniences like containers and baskets—and symbolically—through language and other cultural codes. Her work has been exhibited in Los Angeles at Durden and Ray, Human Resources, Sow & Tailor, and Flux Factory, and at my pet ram in New York. Her writing has been published in BOMB Magazine and The Rib. She has taught at Pratt Institute, Pomona College, and Scripps College.