Handbuilding Complex Forms

with Chris Salas
CER 662 001 | 3 credits
In-person: January 7 - 20, 2024, 9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m. EST

In this intensive course, we will push the limits of sculptural and functional ceramics through large-scale form building. With a focus on the coil and pinch building methods, students will equip themselves with strategies, techniques, and practices which are helpful to hand build complex shapes, construct at a large scale, as well as make dynamic surfaces. To maximize our building time, we will be using slip, wash, stains, and underglaze to develop surfaces, with the majority of work being once-fired to cone 6. In the final days of class, we will commemorate our hard work with a communal pit firing.

We will examine and discuss the work of contemporary and historical ceramic artists such as: Raven Halfmoon, George Rodriguez, Amia Yokoyama, Viola Frey, Matt Wedel, Isamu Noguchi, Woody De Othello among many others. We will read excerpts from the books “Finding One’s Way With Clay” by Paulus Berensohn and “A Potter’s Workbook” by Clary Illian. We will also watch a short documentary on the ceramic artist Lee Kang-Hyo.

While the bulk of our studio work will revolve around hand-building a large scale, complex object whose foundation starts from many parts, we will also have a daily practice considering various aspects of complexity as well as idea generation.

Chris Salas (they/them) is an artist and educator primarily working in Ceramics. Their studio practice is a search for a particular mental state – the engaged and unconscious divergence and convergence of ideas that imbue themselves into objects. These objects become abstracted forms of personal experiences, relationships, conversations, research – all of which currently revolves around time, place, momentum, with a pervasive presence of the history of colonization of the Americas.

Chris received a BA in Chemistry from Michigan State University and an MFA in Ceramics from Cranbrook Academy of Art. They have attended residencies at Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, MN, Ceramics School in Hamtramck, MI, Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Newcastle, ME, Starworks Ceramics in Star, NC, and Township10 in Marshall, NC. Chris is a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Association of Independent Colleges of Art and Design (AICAD) Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship.

Chris Salas, aloe, 2022, Stoneware, sinter engobe, glaze, 14.5 x 12.5 x 11 inches