SOU’WESTER EVENTS!
Discover what’s happening during your next stay or plan a visit around our free live music, workshops, wellness offerings and more!
A beginner-friendly session, where you’ll learn handbuilding skills to craft a decorative or functional object. Clay Dates are open to solos, duos or friend groups and include a demo, clay, glaze, firing, and plenty of lasting memories for.
Pieces are glazed, fired and ready for pick up in 3-6 weeks. Shipping is available for our visiting attendees for $15 plus shipping costs. Bring friends and enjoy a group discount on additional tickets!
$15 off any 3 Clay Dates. Location: Ilwaco Artworks
Clay Plays are casual, beginner-friendly pottery sessions where you will learn basic ceramic handbuilding skills to create functional or decorative objects. Ages 10+ with an adult or ages 14+. Pieces are glazed, fired and ready for pick up in 3-6 weeks. Shipping is available for our visiting attendees for $15 plus shipping costs.
In this class you will learn a variety of surface design techniques and take your pottery to the next level. You will make stamps, explore sgraffito using colored slips, learn basic monoprinting and play with texture. Students will be given tiles to practice these methods. Includes glazing and firing.
STUDIO COURSE BUNDLE – 3 Classes for only $90 when you register for all 3!
- Working in the Ceramics Studio – Wedging to Glazing
- Surface Explorations
- All Things Glaze
Discount automatically applied when you add all three classes to your cart.
12/2-12/16: 3-Week Wheel Throwing Series | All Levels | Mondays, 2pm-4pm
Ilwaco Artworks Community Clay Studio – 109 1st Ave N Ilwaco, WA
Whether you’re new to the wheel or have years of experience, this class is designed to elevate your pottery throwing skills. Each session begins with a brief demonstration, followed by hands-on instruction tailored to naturally advance your abilities toward your personal goals. For advanced students, the projects are open-ended, allowing for creative exploration, while beginners will receive one-on-one guidance to successfully craft chosen objects like cups, bowls, planters, and more. We’ll examine wedging, throwing, trimming, altering, and surface treatment in depth to ensure you develop a well-rounded skill set.
Whether you’re new to the wheel or have years of experience, this class is designed to elevate your pottery throwing skills. Each session begins with a brief demonstration, followed by hands-on instruction tailored to naturally advance your abilities toward your personal goals. For advanced students, the projects are open-ended, allowing for creative exploration, while beginners will receive one-on-one guidance to successfully craft chosen objects like cups, bowls, planters, and more. We’ll examine wedging, throwing, trimming, altering, and surface treatment in depth to ensure you develop a well-rounded skill set.
A beginner-friendly session, where you’ll learn handbuilding skills to craft a decorative or functional object. Clay Dates are open to solos, duos or friend groups and include a demo, clay, glaze, firing, and plenty of lasting memories for.
Pieces are glazed, fired and ready for pick up in 3-6 weeks. Shipping is available for our visiting attendees for $15 plus shipping costs. Bring friends and enjoy a group discount on additional tickets!
$15 off any 3 Clay Dates. Location: Ilwaco Artworks
n this workshop students will create detailed and colorful bowls by layering underglazes and freehand newsprint stencils.
We will spend the first day of this workshop creating large bowls that will serve as canvases for the color work on day two.
On the second day, once the bowls have firmed up, we will explore color layering and freehand newsprint stenciling. By applying underglaze under and over our stencils, we all create a harmonized composition of sharp lines, patterns, organic overlays, and fascinating colors.This technique allows for detailed designs and adds depth in your piece.
In this hands-on class, you’ll explore alternative firing methods in a communal kiln firing setting such as Horsehair and Obvara.
Option one $40: Pick up 2lbs of raku clay at the studio any time after purchase and build your pieces at home. Drop your work off at the studio to be bisque-fired by 12/7. Then, join us for the raku fire, 12/21, where we will glaze and fire your pieces and they will be ready to take home that day. Basic tools kits are also for sale in the studio.
Option two $60: Join us on 12/21 and choose from pre-made, bisqued pieces to be glazed and fired and taken home that day!
Horse Hair Raku is a pottery technique that involves applying strands of horsehair to hot ceramic surfaces. As these materials burn, they leave intricate smoke patterns and carbon trails, which become permanent decorative marks on the piece once it cools.
Obvara—also known as “Baltic Raku”—is a little known Eastern European technique in which pottery, fresh from the kiln, is quickly submerged into a fermented mixture of water, sugar, and yeast. This process results in organic, black-and-white surface patterns and pigmentation that are completely unique, and is completed in under an hour.
American Raku is a contemporary take on the traditional Japanese method. In this process, works are removed from the kiln at peak heat, where rapid oxidation or combustible reduction produces dramatic surface effects on the clay and glaze. The results, uniquely colored by fire and smoke, are ready to handle in less than an hour. While pre-made ceramic vessels are provided by Ilwaco Artworks, students are encouraged to create their own pieces.
What If
an intimate solo exhibition of sculptural works by Dawn Stetzel
Nov-Dec 2024
Artist Talk Sat, Dec 21st | 6pm | Free and open to all!
Fire Coversall Fire Coveralls
2023
zip hazmat suit, image transfers, urban fire zone
Fire Coveralls is a hazmat suit covered in flames, wearable, by me, by many. I use this wearable fire suit as a garment that I can climb into, as a way to try to enter, to attempt to more fully engage in a conversation I am unable to understand. Temperatures rise and extended fire seasons intensify. I made Fire Coveralls as fire seems to cover all, and I don’t know what to do about it. This work gives me the opportunity to grapple with how to exist in our climate crisis and live in our house on fire.
Biography
Dawn Stetzel is a visual artist from the United States living on the Long Beach Peninsula on the southern coast of Washington. Her body-activated sculptures become ambitious attempts at reimagining a sustainable existence. The heart of her deep emotional distress lays within the climate crisis and its impact on disparity and spatial and environmental justice. Using a tinge of the ridiculous, these works suggest struggles seeking opportunistic-existence within dysfunction.
She has a Master of Fine Arts from the College of Visual and Performing Arts at The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. She has exhibited widely through multiple solo exhibitions, public art commissions and group exhibitions across the United States including Grounds for Sculpture, Disjecta and the Portland Biennial. Her work is included in permanent public collections at The City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the Shiwan Ceramic Museum in the Guangdong Province of China. Her work is printed in multiple publications, she has shown internationally and has lectured in the United States, China and Brazil. Innovative in her field and in recognition of the quality of her work and dedication to her art over a period of many years, she was recently awarded a 2024 Individual Support Grant from the Gottlieb Foundation in New York.
web: dawnstetzel.com
Artist Statement
I make sculptural objects, contraptions that interact with a specific environment. These environments are usually in the margins of places, feeling somehow desolate, vast, or lonely due to forms of neglect or absence. These are places I find oddly fascinating, sometimes disgusting and pull at visceral threads in my being. Often these landscapes exhibit hints of resourcefulness and potential paths to new ways of living in a place, thus they feel somewhat like home to me.
Within this environment I use my sculpture as a tool, or mode of locomotion in which to navigate the landscape. Manually operated, these pieces require me to physically propel, push, pull, row or ski and push the limits of my physical strength, safety and comfort levels. This process places my work between sculpture and performance.
My sculptures embrace the aesthetics of resourcefulness, repairing, adaptability and invention. I prefer a low-tech approach and glean materials from my surroundings. I select all materials for their inherent story of place relevant to the concepts within each sculpture. This process of collecting materials puts me in the edges of places, a process I need to connect me to my emotions, the specifics of place and a non-threatening bridge of connection to other people through their discards.
I am currently making work that struggles with seeking moments of survival within a dysfunctional system, on the move, searching opportunistic existence. I use a tinge of the ridiculous and make pieces that function but just barely. I am exploring spatial and environmental justice, systematic disparity, and the climate crisis. The heart of my deep emotional distress lays within our overlapping crises as the climate crisis connects us all and at the same time amplifies our disparity gap.
Implementing a mechanism of survival is not a safe feeling; it is one of risk, uncertainty and maybe just barely making it. The solo nature of this work and many of my pieces reflect my extreme independence as a trauma response. It contains a longing for trust in the universe, in humanity and political systems to equitably help and protect when needed
