Intro to Hand-building: Clay Monsters

Ceramics w/ Laura Blankenship Balancing experimentation, guided step by step instructions, and space to customize your creations from your own imagination, these clay classes are designed to hone your foundational hand-building skills so that you feel equipped to make anything you can dream of. Ages 12 to adults This class: Intro to Hand-building: Clay Monsters! Friday, October 16, 5:00-8:00 hand-building Friday, October 23. 5:00-8:00 painting pottery $50 per person (Two people for $85 – call for discount!) 8 students minimum. 15 maximum. We all have a little monster in us! Personalize your own beautiful, scary, or absurd creature just in time to decorate the porch for Halloween. By the end of this class, expect to feel empowered to create anything you can imagine using the basic forms foundational to all hand-building! About the instructor Laura Marie Blankenship’s wild, wooly work bridges the gap between the tactile craft of felting and the embodied art of abstract expressionism. Her art is deeply informed by her 8 years as a live music painter, teaching yoga and meditation, and time spent as a wilderness therapy field guide, and answering crisis/suicide hotline calls, with her formal background in Psychology from The College of William and Mary. She was awarded a scholarship and studio assistantship at the Penland School of Craft in 2015, is a frequent instructor of wet felting and needle felting at Earthskills Gatherings throughout the Southeast, and from 2022 to 2025, she served as a full-time public school art teacher. With painting names like “there is nothing that cannot be transformed into joy,” her current studio practice centers create action-painted abstracts that serve as victory cries (and sometimes desperate pleas) for emotional integration and personal transformation. Laura Marie Blankenship lives and works in Damascus, Virginia, where she continues to paint, teach, hike, bike, kayak, share beauty, create connection, and ask for guidance from the trees, trails, and beings in and around the South Holston River.