Glass and Clay: A Material Laboratory with Ana Drucker

This course is directed at artists, ceramicists, designers and curious makers interested in pushing ceramics beyond conventional rules into experimental territory where glass and clay intersect.

You will learn to work with soda-lime and borosilicate glass in dialogue with a range of clay bodies: using glass as a glaze; painting and decorating ceramic surfaces with crushed, powdered or fragmented glass; embedding it inside clay forms; and building structures where melting glass becomes part of the final piece.

Your teacher will guide you to set up your own material experiments, observe and document outcomes systematically, and develop a more confident, exploratory relationship with both materials, one you can carry back into your own practice.

This is a week-long material laboratory built around one question: what happens when glass and clay are asked to share a kiln, a surface, a body?

Rather than treating glass as just another glaze, we will work with it as a co-author, testing how soda-lime and borosilicate glasses behave when crushed, powdered, fragmented, layered, embedded, pooled, and trapped inside clay structures. We will set up conditions for melting, collapse, tension and unexpected reaction, then read the results together.

You will work across different clay bodies, build small structures designed to hold and respond to molten glass, and develop your own archive of tests — tiles, samples, and small vessels that document what these two materials can do to each other. The emphasis is on curiosity, observation and material thinking rather than polished outcomes.

This is not a glazing class. There are no recipes to copy. The week is a sustained invitation to experiment, fail productively, and leave with a richer vocabulary for both materials.