Turning Earth offers a range of learning opportunities, including weekly classes at set times and week-long immersion courses. We have options for people at every level of experience: courses for beginners, courses for intermediates, general classes, and specialist classes in a range of disciplines, including wheel throwing.
Click on the links to the studios to see what's available near you.
Students who come to a Turning Earth class will be introduced to each stage of the multi-step process of making their first pieces. Class participants spend roughly half of the time getting to grips with the principle hand-building techniques, and the other half mastering the wheel.
Firstly, your teacher will introduce you to studio life and its processes. You will then learn how to properly prepare clay, and some of the fundamental techniques used to make forms, such as pinching, coiling and building with slabs. You will also learn about the wheel. Importantly, how to centre your work, and how to begin to effectively form the various shapes that are possible using this technique.
Making things with clay is a technical, but fun and rewarding, multi-stepped process. You'll start shaping a form out of a soft malleable clay body. This will then dry until it is ‘leather hard’, in order for it to be ready to be refined and decorated. When your piece becomes bone dry (usually after a few days) it can be placed it in the bisque kiln, by your teacher, where it will be fired to around a thousand degrees. The piece will then come out ‘bisque’ or ‘biscuit’ fired - at this time, the clay body is still porous, and able to absorb the water, creating a thin film of powder all over the piece. At this stage, you can choose from and apply one (or even two) of the many vibrant glazes available. The piece will then be fired again - this time at an even higher temperature - to melt the glaze onto the pot for the final product.
When your work is ready to be bisque fired, there’ll be a small charge of £5 per kg for clay used. For an average piece this works out at about £2. (For environmental reasons we encourage people to - as far as possible - only fire work that they know they want to keep. Firing is an irreversible process. Clay can be recycled until it is fired; unwanted fired work can at best be used as aggregate in building supplies, but at the moment is more likely to end up in landfill.)
A 12-week course or a week-long intensive will give you the grounding you need to attend the studio as an independent open-access member. Those wanting to make rapid progress as a ceramic artist often choose to take a course and open-access membership in tandem, and many take several courses with the same or different instructors to cement their knowledge. If you have done a course or two with us and you feel it's time for you to progress and join our membership program, our Accelerated Learning Package (ALP) is a special, one-time-only offer for students in our classes who decide to become a member before the end of their course. This gives you £100 off your first membership subscription. Contact us if you would like to know more.
Turning Earth classes are all taught by passionate ceramic artists who also make and sell their own work. Many of them have followed the Turning Earth route into a making career - beginning as members in our studios and slowly progressing to selling their work and often opening their own studios.
They have all studied and worked on their own practice extensively before training as teachers through the Turning Earth studio system, and shadowed and assisted other instructors before becoming lead teacher in their own classes. All teachers are well-versed in the Turning Earth curriculum, and each will have personalised the course to reflect their own strengths and making styles.
The main objective of our courses is to teach you how to make ceramics well and help you practise and develop your technique, rather than to make as many pots as possible. We do rather see our students take home a few pieces they’re really proud of and that show off their development in skills, than producing as much as possible.
How many finished pieces you can expect to take home depends entirely on the individual’s skills and artistic vision. While some students enjoy the process and speed that can be achieved with throwing on the wheel, others enjoy the meditative process of making detailed and sculptural work.
Our 12-week courses are our most popular courses as they offer a great balance between learning technique and getting your practice in. Our shorter courses (with exception of our Intensive Courses) are condensed and you’ll have less time to get practising and making than you’ll have on a full 12-week course.
You can not bring your own clay, glazes or other ceramic materials to our classes. If you are keen to experiment with other clays or glazes, we recommend joining our studios as a member which will give you the opportunity to experiment more. Note that it is not possible to use Terracotta or other Earthenware in any of our studios.
Our courses are designed to teach all students hand-building as well as wheel-throwing techniques. Most lessons will have the group of students split in two with half of the group working on the wheel while the other half of the group work on their hand-building projects, and then swap around so that everyone gets a fair chance at practicing all the technique. We do have throwing-only courses for students who wish to learn wheel-throwing only. Look out for those in the course listings.
Tools and materials are not included in the course fee. You can opt-in to purchase a basic toolkit when you book your course. The 8-piece kits cost £5 and contain all the basic tools you’ll need. If you already have your own tools, you can bring those instead. Clay is not included in the course fees. There is a charge of £5 per kg for all the pots you make and wish to fire. You’ll only pay for the pots you select to be fired so you can practice your skills to your heart’s content and choose which creations you want to send to the kilns to be immortalized.
Our intermediate throwing course is aimed at potters who are confident at all the basic throwing techniques such as wedging, centering, making cylinders, making bowls and trimming as these techniques will not be covered in the course. The course focuses on advanced techniques such as throwing larger pieces, lidded jars, teapots, throwing off the hump etc.
You’ll need to bring your own apron to the class and make sure it is clean. Dirty aprons are notorious dust spreaders which is a danger to yourself as well as your fellow students. We recommend choosing non-natural fabrics as they tend to trap clay dust more easily.
We advise you to wear sensible clothing and shoes as pottery can get quite messy!
Once a place has been booked, the fees are non-refundable. However, if we are still able to sell your place to another student before the course starts, we’ll be happy to swap your place over and refund your fees. We’ll do our best, though you’ll understand we can’t make any promises.
On most courses, you should be able to catch up in your next lesson. The first few and last few lessons are the most crucial lessons as that’s when you’ll learn how to get started and when you’ll finish your projects. It is important not to miss these. It is not possible to catch up on a class or sit in on a lesson on a different course. To make sure that you make the most of your course, it is very important that you make sure that you can make all the class dates before you sign up to a course.
You should wait at least 2 weeks after your last lesson before coming to collect your class pots. Please note that you won’t receive an email from our team when your work will be ready to collect. You’ll have to collect your work within 2 months of ending your course. Our studios are busy with a continuous stream of new students and we do not have the space to store your pots for any longer than that.
All our courses, with the exception of those advertised as ‘intermediate’, are suitable for students of all levels. You don’t need any previous experience of ceramics to join the course and get stuck in. We do get many students who do our courses more than once - while they have the basic skills, they use the course to refine their technique and get some more practice under the guidance of a teacher. And of course there is the social aspect of being part of a group and learning together.
