Workshops Archive
My workshops aim to meet hands-on learning experiences with deep collective thinking. I think it makes a huge difference to learn through tactile exploration, to chat and play as we make, cross-pollinating our ideas.
These are the skills we build together, to fertilize new ways of thinking and re-member ritualistic making practices, for communion with an always changing, growing, dying, living world.
Faith in a Seed: A Clay Seed Pod Workshop
Hosted by Amoca and California Botanic Garden, May 30-31, 2025.
In this ceramics workshop, we spent the first day at the California Botanic Garden touring their extensive native seed bank and observing their living collection of CA native plants. Afterward, we did some sensory field journaling exercises in the Garden, shaping personal narratives with the plants that surround us in our everyday lives. California Botanic Garden is the largest botanic garden dedicated to California native plants: an 86 acre living museum dedicated to education, research, and conservation.
The next day, in the AMOCA Studio, students shared their botanical findings and explored the artist’s collection of locally foraged seed pods. We continued our conversation around fostering habitats for our more-than-human neighbors, discussing human impact on the natural environment. As we imagined new possibilities for collaborations with the plant world around us, students built their own tactile seed pod architectures through clay, using essential ceramic hand-building techniques to create both ephemeral and permanent sculptures: Clay Seed Pods.
Clay Seed Pod Happening
at The Philosophical Research Soceity’s Plantstock Festival, May 24th 2025.
A collaborative sculpture workshop fundraising in aid of Altadena Seed Library.
What can we learn from looking closely at seed pods, by dancing their dance?
In this one-day workshop at the PRS Plantstock Festival, participants sculpted a giant collaborative clay seed pod.
Seed pods teach us about carrying precious and precarious futures, they know how to make and unmake themselves, they contain the knowledge of letting go. Together we must learn to weave new containers for ongoingness, composting those that no longer carry us.
Looking at examples of locally foraged seed pods, we adapted fundamental clay hand-building techniques to build our large scale pod. Following the profound loss of the Eaton and Palisades fires, we face the complex work of rebuilding our neighborhoods. With this collective gesture, we honored what had been lost, holding space for the hopeful act of reseeding in the wake of disaster. As we made our collaborative giant pod, we discussed human impact on local ecologies, and how we can foster native habitats in our neighborhoods. In addition to building the collaborative sculpture, participants made clay seed balls embedded with native wildflower seeds to cast into their neighborhoods.
Making Oddkin Series
A ceramics workshop exploring earthling ecology!Ongoing series, 2024
Making Oddkin: Backyard Bugs
July 2 2024, at Debs Park, Los AngelesIn this first session, we focussed on backyard bugs, thinking about coexistence and collaboration with our invertebrate neighbors. Workshoppers looked to insect morphology for sculptural inspiration and discussed ‘beneficial bugs’ and how to encourage local habitats.
In each session participants sculpted an insect-inspired ceramic pendant to charm their garden or doorway. In addition to the workshop instruction, participants were provided with some supplementary reading material; including the artist’s zine of with ecological gardening tips, vintage insect morphology diagrams and an excerpt of bug-fiction from Ursula K. Le Guin!
According to studies published by Biological Conservation (2019), 40% of all insects are declining globally, with a third of them endangered. We must not dismiss the plight of the creepy-crawlies! The insect apocalypse would have catastrophic effects on our ability to grow food. Our pollinators are essential to life on earth.
Eco-feminist scholar Donna Haraway coined the phrase ‘making oddkin’, proposing the necessity for kinship with the more-than-human beings we share our home with.
This workshop opened an opportunity for playful making and collective thinking in the face of climate catastrophe. A tactile entryway to the ecological conversation, a place to share resources and promote awareness of the small-but-mighty actions we can take to foster habitats in our neighborhoods.
As we thought and sculpted in collectivity, we practiced fundamental ceramic hand-building techniques. I think of hand-building is an ideal conversation-craft, conducive to sitting gathered around a table, our hands muddling away, as we discuss these tangly topics.
This workshop facilliatated a tendrilly conversation, where participants could ask questions, share garden-bug tales and stretch out their feelers out in clay!
References
Biological Conservation 2019
Fresh Air, NPR, 2022
Staying with the Trouble; Making Kin in the Cthuluscene
Making Oddkin: Plant-Pollinator Symbiosis (3 Parts)
Current Offering: August 11, 18 and 25, 2024, at Debs Park, Los Angeleswith artist-naturalist Rosie Brand and plant ecologist Yara Nictè Herrarte.
In these three evening sessions, our focus will be plant-pollinator symbiosis. We’ll study monarch butterflies and native milkweeds, chaparral yucca and their exclusive moth lovers and discover the expansive world of native bees and their plant communities. Each of these reciprocal relationships tell an intricately specific interspecies love story. Co-evolved symbionts can teach us what it means to belong to one another, in an ever-increasingly troubled world.
As we think and make together we’ll practice fundamental ceramic hand-building techniques, looking to insect morphology for sculptural inspiration. Hand-building is so conducive to conversation; sitting gathered around a table, with hands muddling away, as we discuss these tangly topics.
In each session of Making Oddkin, participants will sculpt an insect-inspired ceramic pendant to charm their garden or doorway. If participants are able to take multiple workshops, they will string their charms together to make a garden garland, though individual charms work beautifully as single pendants.
In addition to workshop instruction, participants will receive supplementary reading materials; excerpts of insect-inspired fiction/media and a zine of drawings, diagrams and ecological gardening tips!
Facillitators:
Yara Nictè Herrarte is a wholehearted naturalist and plant ecology graduate with love deeply rooted in California native flora, pollination ecology, and land stewardship.
She has worked with the Xerces Society, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the US Forest Service, the Los Angeles Arboretum & Botanic Garden, as well as the Huntington Garden. She has spent the last 6 months in Costa Rica researching tropical butterfly species, their longevity, along with their associated parasitoids and predators.
Rosie Brand is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator, living on Tongva land: Los Angeles, CA.
She is a certified California Naturalist and holds workshops at various arts institutions and community centers such as Heavy Manners Library, Feminist Center for Creative Work and The Infinite School. She is the founder and co-facilitator of the collaborative project worm school, who hold community reading-discussions with material exercises for thinking hands.
Clay Seed Pod II
2024Various iterations for adults and all ages held at Plant Material, Altadena.
In this one-day ceramics workshop we observed a collection of locally foraged seed pods, learning from their more-than-human architectures. Exploring these tactile forms through clay, we practiced essential ceramic handbuilding techniques to create botanical sculptures: Clay Seed Pods.
In this workshop, we asked-
What can be learned by looking closely at the very small, the unnoticed, the dispossessed and decomposing parts of our world?
I have learned so much from these intricate anomalous structures. This is the language of plants, weeds and seeds. It’s one you can only speak with your hands.
Seed pods have much to say about holding carefully, about carrying precious and precarious futures. Seed pods contain the knowledge of letting go. Seed pods know how to make and unmake themselves.
This class had various iterations for adults and all ages, open to students of all levels of clay experience. This workshop is an ongoing offering, please contact for more information on future sessions.