Sharing the joy of clay
The Community Ceramics Studio at SebArts has a fun new(ish) studio manager and loads of new classes
Have you always wanted to try ceramics, but didn’t know where to start? Or are you a ceramics veteran who’s lost touch with the art of clay? Either way, if it’s time to get your hands dirty, the Community Ceramics Studio at Sebastopol Center for the Arts is the place to go.
Alice Rathjen, the center’s ceramics department manager, took over the job a year and a half ago. Since then she’s transformed not just the offerings of ceramic studio, but the spirit of the place itself. It’s been infused by her infectious sense of fun and enthusiasm — and that of the 20 or so volunteers that keep the place running on a day-to-day basis, contributing roughly 2,700 hours of free labor per year.
Like all good managers, she shares the credit generously.
“My job is to figure out how to make this wonderful facility be of service to the community,” she said. “When you said I made some changes, I'd say no, I think the volunteers made the changes. What it required was for me to create the spaciousness to hear from them, like, ‘What do you guys need for this to be a fun place to work and volunteer?’ And then to support them in the vision that they reflected back to me…Mostly what I do, truth be told, is run around, moving buckets of clay and sludge and stuff like that,” she said with a laugh.
The ceramic studio at SebARTS was started 15 years ago, thanks to some major donors like John O'Hare, Patricia and Frank Schueler and Robert Brent.
“That's what made this wonderful space happen,” Rathjen said.
One of Rathjen’s first goals, when she took over the job of ceramics manager, was to attract more people to the studio.
Concerned that people were staying away out of lack of experience with ceramics, she started out offering “ceramics studio orientations” for beginners, but few people showed up.
Now she suggests that beginners take her three-session, sliding-scale Handbuilding class, and that has proved much more popular. She said she’s rolled much of what she used to include in the orientation into this class. The next Handbuilding class starts on Wednesday, February 7 and ends on February 21. (Learn more about her Handbuilding class here.)
She’s also quadrupled the number of ceramics classes on offer.
“That brought in a lot more people,” she said. “But there's always room for more. It's like a big Italian family.”
Today, around a 150 people a month use the studio.
“We go through about 1000 pounds of clay a month, probably more,” she said.
“We want people to feel welcome,” Rathjen said.
“There's just tremendous joy in creating in community,” she continued. “Painters, you know, they paint by themselves, and they struggle on their own. In the clay room, folks come in here and they get energy from watching the beautiful things that other people make. And there's something about having all your stuff in a kiln together—where this is all being subjected to the humility of 2000 degrees, right?”
The studio, like the kiln, is a shared space, and Rathjen knows that’s not everyone’s cup of tea, so she has this caveat:
“We have such a huge volume and such a large number of brand new users that you have to have tolerance for somebody's pot maybe falling over and messing up your pot. We do everything we can to prevent loss, of course, but for the folks that are super serious, they have to understand that it's a shared space and so there's not necessarily that level of control.”
But for most people, the joy of creating in community more than makes up for that.
“I have a lot of people that this is their community,” Rathjen said. “They come here and they drop in and what they make clay-wise is really secondary to the fun they have.”
How much does all this fun cost? You can purchase six open-studio sessions for $100, or one session for $20. Clay is $40 a bag. A recurring monthly subscription of $150 provides users drop-in access to the studio anytime during open studio hours: Monday and Tuesday, 9 am to 9 pm; Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, 9 am to 1 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 9 am to 5 pm.
Find out more about the ceramics program at SebARTS here. Discover ceramics (and other art) classes here.