Wild Clay and Pit Firing with Maria Roy

This course is designed for ceramicists, artists, designers, and curious makers who want to immerse themselves in the full journey of working with clay while connecting their practice to local materials and the surrounding landscape.

Throughout the week, you'll learn how to identify and recognise wild clay, understand its properties, process it into workable clay bodies for different applications, and transform it through pit firing. Working directly with locally sourced materials, you'll gain hands-on experience in clay foraging, material processing, and experimental ceramic techniques.

Maria will guide you through both practical making and reflective discussions, encouraging an experimental, research-led approach to ceramics. Rather than focusing solely on functional objects, you'll explore clay as a material that carries stories and deep connections to place.

Making becomes a way of responding to landscape, memory, ecology, and personal experience.

One of the highlights of this course is the opportunity to work directly with the landscape surrounding Salemi. You'll dig, process, shape, and fire clay collected from the local area itself.

This is an experiential and highly experimental course. Working with wild clay and pit firing naturally involves unpredictability, surprise, and material transformation. Rather than aiming for perfect results, you'll be encouraged to embrace the process, experimentation, and discovery.