A co-learning online space set up for people interested in exploring ways to develop different, more emancipatory systems of working within and with the clay studio. Facilitated by Eva Masterman & featuring Jenny Sorkin, Joon Lynn Goh, Oren Shoesmith & the Portland Inn Project.
Dates
& Booking
Terms 1 and 2 are available to book on Eventbrite {LINK}
Term 1 – Ways of Organising
16th October (with Joon Lynn Goh) / 30th October / 6th November
Term 2 – Studio
13th November (with Portland Inn Project) / 27 November / 11th December
Term 3 – Material Practice
22nd January 2025 (with Jenni Sorkin) / 5th February / 19th February
We are excited to launch Building The Clay Commons Night Class (online) facilitated by Eva Masterman and featuring artists, organisers and academics Joon Lynn Goh, the Portland Inn Project, Jenni Sorkin and Oren Shoesmith.
This online night class is set up as a co-learning space for people interested in exploring ways to develop different, more emancipatory systems of working within and with the clay studio. Over 3 terms (with each term made up of 3, two-hour sessions) we will focus on themes of Ways of Organising, Studio, Material Practice and together, in small cohorts, work towards practical ways in which we can imagine and enact alternative ways of working and learning together with clay.
Each term will feature a speaker who will outline ideas surrounding the term’s focus area (Ways of Organising, Studio, Material Practice). This will be followed by readings and references to engage within and between classes, as well as exercises where participants are invited to bring practical applications of these theories to the last session for supportive discussion. We will also engage in embodied clay meditations in each term.
Background
This online night class builds on the week-long immersive workshop and collaboration that took place at SSW in November 2023 and Eva Masterman’s PhD research. See images from this week on our blog.
About the contributers
Joon-Lynn Goh is a cultural organiser and co-founding director of Migrants in Culture, a migrant-led design agency that resources artists and organisers to build more creative and powerful social movements. Joon-Lynn is a Thirty Percy Changemaker, a GLA Civic Futures Fellow 2021-22 and co-recipient of UNHCR Champion of the Year, Women on the Move Award 2016. She declined a 2019 MBE for Services to Equality for organising a Syrian refugee resettlement programme with Bristol City Council and Citizens UK (2014-2017).
The Portland Inn Project CIC (PIP) is a creative arts organisation with an aim to achieve community cohesion, economic, social and cultural development by involving the community in the development of a pioneering community space, cultural hub and social enterprise. Currently we work from the PIPPIN – a temporary space where we design and deliver a wide ranging programme of activity. Founded by two artists, Anna Francis & Rebecca Davies, in a residential area of Stoke on Trent, working in collaboration with other artists, arts organisations, designers, service providers and residents to improve our area. We advocate for people-led change, and champion the importance of art in leading that change, in cooperation with public services.
PIP is cited as an exemplar project of people led change, in an under-represented part of the city. PIP’s deeply embedded, progressive approach has helped us deliver a collaborative architectural plan and raise significant funding for a pioneering cultural space in the neighbourhood, the first of its kind in the city. Renovation began in October 2023 In 2022 PIP became Arts Council NPO.
Oren Shoesmith is an artist and mystic living in Glasgow. He works messily between sculpture, performance, text, moving image and community organising. His clay practice stems from embodied research into traditional witchcraft as a position for land resistance, political disobedience and gender dissidence. Currently Oren is exploring the tool kit of the Droll Teller, a Cornish tale weaver, as a way to approach complex land realities, rural industries and routes for decolonisation.
His recent projects include Corpores Infames, a performance for Glasgow international 2024 in collaboration with Belladonna Paloma and Rabindranath X Bhose. Corpores Infames is an ode to the bog, drawing on rich histories of bog body sacrifices and the links between them and trans, queer and disabled bodies. What is a Cave if not an opening into the body is his first moving image work, installed at EPOCH at Tremenheere Sculpture Garden in 2024. It is rooted in research into lithium mined from the earth, the lithium found in holy wells and also pharmacologically manufactured lithium in treatments for madness.
