Lighting Workshop w/Maggie Boyd and Melissa Weiss

Please join us for a very special workshop featuring not one, but TWO incredible teachers and friends of the studio: Maggie Boyd and Melissa Weiss! Maggie and Melissa are teaming up for this two-day workshop focusing on both throwing and hand-building lamps, pendants, and candlesticks. Students will have the opportunity to glaze and fire their work at Gasworks NYC (at 3.5 cents per cubic inch). Once fired, there will be a third class offered where students can learn how to wire their lamps. Hardware can be purchased from Melissa during the workshop.

This is an intermediate/advanced handbuilding and throwing class. Students should feel comfortable either throwing upwards of 4 lbs on the wheel, or handbuilding using pinching, coiling, and slab techniques. 

The schedule will be as follows:

Artist talk, Friday Sept 11 at 7pm TBC 

Day 1, Saturday Sept 12: Working on throwing and/or hand-building table and pendant lamps. Maggie and Melissa will demonstrate their various techniques, and students will have time to explore and play with their forms under teacher guidance. Students may choose whether they want to throw or hand-build (or do both!). Students will have until 5pm to work under instruction, and until 8pm to finish projects in the studio. 

Day 2, Sunday Sept 13: Finish up day 1 projects, with an option to build candlesticks. Maggie and Melissa will demo surface techniques as inspiration for students. Students will have until 5pm to work under instruction, and until 8pm to finish projects in the studio. 

Once work is bisqued, students may book time in the studio to glaze their work. 

Day 3, October 4, 1:30-3:30pm: 3 weeks later, students have the option to return to the studio once their work is fired to assemble their lamps with hardware, assisted by Gasworks Studio Manger/Instructor Ester Kwon. This optional 3rd class will only be offered once. 

Maggie Boyd is a Canadian living in NYC while making clay things, drawings, and sculptures. On top of her studio practice, she is an instructor and author. Maggie is the 2026 Artist in Residence for LAND gallery in Brooklyn, a gallery and studio for adults with developmental disabilities. Her upcoming book, ‘HOW TO MAKE A POT,’ will be released in fall 2026 through Sacred Bones.  

Melissa Weiss is a full time artist working primarily in clay. She lives and works in Asheville NC. Melissa took a ceramics class for the first time in 2004. She set up a studio shortly after that and continues experimenting and exploring this inexhaustible material. Melissa makes illustrative, functional ceramics from a variety of clays including wild clay dug from her land in the Arkansas Ozarks, the traditional territories of the Caddo, Osage and Quapaw tribes. She uses color and pattern to create a visual language that calls the past into the present forging a path forward into the future. She is influenced by medieval, Greek, Etruscan and folk art from around the world, aesthetically and how these peoples explore(d) the human condition visually. She is inspired by all people past and present fighting for liberation and a just world.

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