Wheel Throwing

Tuition: $175; Non-members $190

This workshop is designed to introduce the beginning student to wheel throwing. Students will receive the benefit of one-on-one instruction from two experienced instructors.

Melinda Collins, a 5th generation Texan, has had extensive experience both teaching and creating many types of pottery for 25 years. A 1977 graduate of the University of Texas in mathematics and biology, before going to Guatemala she taught at Kilgore College, a small college in East Texas as director of the Adult Learning Center. In Antigua, Guatemala, she taught claywork, both wheel thrown and handbuilt, to beginners and experienced artists from all over the world. Melinda was featured in the Guatemalan English language magazine, the REVUE, for her work with native materials and pure jade glazes in the article “Shaping Art”, and wrote articles related to clay for the magazine. Other articles in the REVUE included “Traditional Guatemalan Clay Cooking Vessels-Indigenous Pottery”, and another on building high firing kilns from locally available materials: “Inside the Clay Studio.”

High points of her work in Guatemala included designing and making porcelain dinnerware for the president of Guatemala, Arturo Arzu, and a Mayan inspired presentation necklace for the current president of the country, Oscar Berger. While in Guatemala, she also operated a gallery of her work, Celadon Galleria de Porcelana, in Antigua. In the fall of 2004 she studied Islamic art and contemporary porcelain in Istanbul, Turkey. Melinda recently completed an article detailing her research with an innovative saggar firing technique to duplicate the fumed reduction lusters of ancient Islamic/Persian pottery.

Her current jewelry Zen Garden Collection uses the Japanese technique of nerikomi or neriage (colored clay patterning) combining porcelain and native volcanic basalt, oxides and pigments.

Ron Collins is a retired USAF instructor pilot. A clay artist and potter with a degree in geology, he is an expert in locating jade and was employed by Jades, SA to locate and buy jade in the mountains of Guatemala. He discovered the previously unknown garnets that he reported to the Departmento de Minerales that are now receiving interest. Fluent in Spanish, he grew up with his family in Colombia and Venezuela. On the Discovery Channel, you will see Ron in “Mayan Jade” when he took the Discovery Channel crew out to the Zacapa area of central Guatemala to find Mayan jade working sites and film the process of identifying, splitting and hauling out jade boulders as it was done by the Maya.

Previously residing in the world heritage site of Antigua, Guatemala, Ron and Melinda Collins are currently developing new ceramic work and living in Kerrville, Texas. They can be reached by email: Melinda@goatcreekpottery.com.