Translation in Clay: Interspecies Poetics with Worm School

Reading material will be sent after registration, facilitators highly reccomend reading the material to further discuss it during the workshop. Join artist collective and reading group Worm School at Craft Contemporary for an afternoon of conversation and experimentation with clay as a medium for language, translation and memory. Seeding ourselves in the rich ground of Octavia Butler and Ursula K. LeGuin’s writings, we’ll explore interspecies poetry with clay as facilitator and translator, inviting participants to bring a glyph or mark made by another species, such as the patterning on collected shells, beetle bite marks, leaf skeletons, and anything that speaks life into the world. Part workshop and part community performance, we’ll explore Octavia Butler’s concept of change in which ‘All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you’ in a collaborative push-pull of reading, conversation and co-creating vessels in which every hand will speak. Participants will be provided with a reading packet before the workshop. Everyone will make collaborative ceramic sculptures, to be fired and returned in a few weeks. Workshop open to all experience levels.