Holding What Hurts: A Special Wheel-Throwing Workshop

In this three-hour workshop, artist and instructor Amy Sanders de Melo will lead participants through a quiet, contemplative experience on the potter’s wheel—an invitation to slow down and connect with the deeper currents of emotion that often go unspoken. Each person will create a porcelain vessel or urn, intended as a symbolic container for life’s more challenging moments. This may be an offering to ancestors, a tribute to personal struggle, or a sacred space to hold grief.

Through this creative process, difficult emotions are not avoided—they are shaped, honored, and transformed. The practice becomes a way to make space for the self, to soften around what is hard.

Porcelain, with its delicate nature and unpredictable temperament, serves as both material and metaphor. As participants work with this sensitive clay, they are encouraged to approach both the medium and themselves with gentleness and care. Amy often incorporates Braille into her ceramics as a way of telling stories and holding space for healing—participants will be invited to consider how touch, memory, and meaning can be carried within the surface of their work.

This is an Intermediate skill level workshop. Participants need to be able to center, pull a wall and make basic cylindrical forms.

Interested in learning more about Amy Sanders de Melo? Come to her artist talk on Friday, July 25th from 6-7PM.

What is included

• Clay

• Tools

 What to bring

• A good attitude and a mind open to learning.

• An apron, or comfortable clothes that you don’t mind getting dirty. 

Please note:

• We are in Pioneer Square, so please plan ahead so that you have enough time to park. You don’t want to miss anything!

• Clay nights do not grant you Studio Access outside of your workshop time.