Tuesday - Sunday, February 17 - 22

Spend five days with potter and sgraffito artist Tim Christensen. The workshop will cover basic techniques, wedging and centering, then move on to collaring and forming, enclosed forms and alternative trimming techniques, throwing big, and throwing off the hump and whip-wiring.

There will be two workshop sessions each day, with open studio time all other hours. Materials (100 lbs of clay) provided. 

ARTIST STATEMENT:

I like to draw about love, loss, fear and foreboding, community, tranquility and loneliness. To me, more important than the immediate political or social issues of the day is the greater struggle of humans to find a way to fit back in to the natural pattern of life on earth. This is the defining struggle of our time, and I feel compelled to illustrate this on my pottery. In the same ways that we know and learn from the cultures who have come before us, my pottery depicts the particular place and time in which I live, and why I think it is important.

I draw on my pieces because it is the best way I know to express what I am thinking about. By working with black and white, I invoke another world where humans are counterparts of the creatures I create. Freed from humano-centrism, people and animals compete and cooperate, interact and take notice of each other as equals. I depict the conflict of being a human who loves the earth but needs her resources to live, of coping with animal instincts made irrelevant in today's culture, and of the challenges of balancing the needs of the individual with the needs of the community. Above all, I draw to illustrate the wonder and mystery of living in the world we share.

BIO:

I live in a small cabin near the ocean in Roque Bluffs, Maine. This arrangement allows me to be in very close contact with all of the natural rhythms coursing around us all. The ocean is about 300 yards away, and I often pack up my tools and a few pieces and draw on a very small island named “Despair.” Across a channel is the island “Hope.” Seals, a family of eagles,and my dog Maggie are constant companions whether I am working on the land or at the water. There are very few people where I live, and I am almost always are alone. The woods where I work are lush with moss, cedar, spruce and maple trees, and countless birds. A pair of foxes keeps a close eye on the flock of hens, safe in their Fort Knox-like coop.

I have been making black and white pieces since 2003. I am getting better as I get deeper into this technique of sgraffito, and probably would stop if I weren’t. I am starting to see my sculptural background seep in, as well as a renewed interest in altering the thrown form. My work is narrative, specifically illustrated, sometimes spiritual, often funny, and understandable. I make pots about the times in which we live, and the challenges of living in a time in which we are divorced from the natural world around us. I make my work to be appreciated by those who know a lot or a little about porcelain or art, and make it with the hopes that some of these pots will survive longer than me or the culture in which we live, and will still be as pertinent and relevant then as now.