Leah Leitson Workshop

I had the pleasure of attending a Leah Leitson workshop at the Dallas Craft Guilt this last weekend. I love her work. On a website promoting her workshop it says,

"Leah works exclusively in porcelain. Her work is predominantly inspired by the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century decorative arts, particularly utilitarian table wares and Sevres porcelain, as well as being inspired by plant forms in nature."

(mudfire.com ). If you'd like to look at her work, they have quite a few photos on that website link, also. What I appreciated most about this workshop was learning how to touch and manipulate a freshly thrown wheel form and transform it into a very different sort of pot.

The picture above has been transformed into a teapot and now sports a handle and a lid. It is a closed form that I put lobes into with a wooden rib, and then after it was leatherhard, paddled into a somewhat square shape.


These are some forms I threw. The one in the foreground is a bowl that I put lobes into and then closed up. Since this photo was taken I've added some legs. My daughter wants me to just leave it like this (with legs), but I want to continue working with it.

My goal is that by the time I've integrated these new techniques, that nothing I produce will look like Leah, but like me. I do NOT want to be a copycat, though I realize that being a copycat is how we initially learn. So if anything I produce looks like Leah, I will be labeling it, "Made after a workshop with Leah Leitson".

Leah is a wonderful teacher. This was a hands on workshop and I have never thrown so much pottery in three days, ever. I also have never thrown Porcelain clay before last weekend. I threw a clay by Laguna named "Miller 550" and I have fallen in love love love with it.