2021 Green and Whitegold Festival

Hands on Workshops

Neil Brownsword Workshops

10:30 – 12:30 & 1:30 – 3:30pm, 25th June
10:30 – 12:30 & 1:30 – 3:30pm, 27th June at Wheal Martyn Clay Works, St Austell
Limited places, booking required

Join artist Neil Brownsword for a hands on clay workshop that intertwines the ceramic histories of the clay countries of St Austell and Stoke-on-Trent.

Use historic hand tools from ceramic tableware manufacturing to form local china clay into vessels and objects, and explore new creative possibilities.

Workshops are suitable for all ages and abilties and no prior experience of clay is required. Workshops are approx 2 hours long.

Workshop are free and limited to 10 participants. Booking is essential.

To book a place, please call Wheal Martyn Clayworks on 01726 850362.

Please note that you whilst the workshop is free, you will need to book a museum ticket, currently available in time slots. Please ensure you book a time slot at least 30 mins before the workshop you wish to attend.

This workshop was generously sponsored by Valentine Clays

Brickfield Kiln Firing

10am – 4pm 24th, 25th & 26th June
Blackpool Pit, St Austell

The Brickfield team will be firing hand made bricks in their mini beehive kiln on site at Blackpool Pit from 24 – 26 June.

Come along to meet the team, see the site and have a look at the brick structures co-designed by Falmouth University Architecture students and The Happy Wanderers built in April this year with the support of Heritage Lottery Fund.

Find out more about the project on the Brickfield pages of our website.

Tree of Life

10am – 4pm 26th June
South Square, St Austell Town Centre

Clayground Collective, a company of creative practitioners who create large-scale clay experiences with the public, will build a Tree of Life of raw clay. With the help of residents of St Blazey and St Austell, and 1 tonne of clay, they will construct a temporary clay tree of the imagination that reflects local and personal histories of the area.

This is a drop in workshop. No booking is necessary but group sizes will be managed throughout the day.

This workshop has been generously sponsored by Potclays Ltd.

This large scale ceramic sculpture is a culmination of Clayground Collective’s collaborative project, Histree, HerTree, TheirTree, History with St Blazey Community Café which has involved online and face to face activities and learning with community participants in St Blazey.

Botany and Beyond: Tile Workshop

Connections Between St Austell’s Biodiversity And The Historic Clay Industry

10am – 4pm 26th June
Aylmer Square, St Austell Town Centre

Throughout the day you’ll have the opportunity to drop in and make your own tile, embossed with clippings from a selection of the plants from the local area.

The workshop brings together Robin Sullivan’s recent explorations into the knock on effects of the china clay industry in Cornwall. Specifically the accidental introduction of over 600 non-native plants species to SX0753 Par Harbour, transferred through the ballast water of ships exporting the minerals over 250 years.

This is a drop in workshop. No booking is necessary but group sizes will be managed throughout the day.

Make sure to check out Robins research on display and sign up for his upcoming field trip around Par July!

This workshop is a starting off point to a larger programme events planned over the next 3 years.

Raku Firing

10am – 4pm 26th June
South Square, St Austell Town Centre
3 opportunities to decorate pots throughout the day before they are fired

Raku originated in Japan in the 15 century and was later developed in America as a reduction firing also, in the 1960s, which is the process you will see today here at the Green and Whitegold Festival.

Raku is a low-fire glazing technique where the pottery is heated up very quickly to 1000 degrees centigrade and cooled down quickly out of the kiln. This causes a thermo shock to the glaze and makes it crackle. It is cooled in combustible materials in an airtight bin and this creates the reduced oxygen atmosphere for the pots to cool down in, which and in turn causes the glazes to turn beautiful colours of gold and copper and the clay body to go black.

24 Raku tea bowls will be available to decorate on the day before they go through the kiln in 3 separate firings. Your pots will be available to take home later.

Put Yourself on the Map

10am – 4pm 26th June
The Market House, St Austell Town Centre

Join Lynn Simms and Ceramicists from the Bays and Clays network to ‘put yourself on the map’ and help to build a representation of St Austell Bay in the material that made the town famous – white clay.

St Austell is an important historical town. It has always been a market town. However from the 18^th century it became famous for it production of white clay- Whitegold. This ceramics workshop will celebrate the town’s transformation into the centre of a worldwide China Clay industry.

Inspired by ‘Clay Story Map’ by Zenna Tagney and Merran Coleman, our map will focus on the town and will be drawn on to the floor of the entrance to the iconic Market House. Symbolic sculptures that represent the buildings and the architectural features of the town will be built in white clay and personalised with drawings, texture and writing, inspired by locally collected stories. These sculptures will be placed on appropriate sections of the map.

We hope that by joining in visitors and locals alike will learn something new about our town, St Austell.

This is a free drop in workshop. No booking is necessary but group sizes will be managed throughout the day.

MakesSpace

10am – 4pm 26th June
Chandos Place, St Austell Town Centre

Join Belinda and Hannah from MakeSpace Cornwall CIC, for a day filled with wonderful wire and found things to create colourful flowers and leaves to take home. Suitable from aged 6+ with parental support, just pop to our stall in St Austell to take part.

Tea Leaf Reading

10am – 4pm 26th June
50 min – 1 hour readings at 10 am, 11.15am, 12:30pm & 2:30pm with moments of performance and poetry in between…
Fore Street, St Austell Town Centre

Join Simon Bayliss and MC Teabag for an afternoon of conversation, collaboration and tea-based destiny!

After hosting an online event at last year’s Window into Whitegold, join the mystical pair for a real life, face to face (and mug to mug) session of tea leaf reading. Combining ancient shamanic knowledge, performance art, social practice and a splash of silliness, these sessions have been designed just for Green and Whitegold, creating a space for festival participants to stop, think and muse upon their future.

Bayliss & Teabag are an occasional artist duo, first collaborating at Newlyn Art Gallery in 2016 and at numerous occasions since. Simon Bayliss is an artist and music producer based in St Ives, Cornwall. Trained as a painter and more recently as a potter, he works mainly in slipware ceramics, dance music and video, with occasional forays into poetry and performance. MC Teabag is one alias of Tom Stockley – an artist, writer and performer living and working across the South West, sporadically appearing in Cornwall from one of many wormholes in the space time continuum.

https://www.simon-bayliss.com/

https://tomstockley.weebly.com/