Handbuilding Workshop with Hayne Bayless

Join us for a two-day immersive workshop exploring approaches to surface treatment using colored slips and inventive pattern-making materials.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of technique, Hayne will discuss pottery’s deeper aesthetic considerations — how technical decisions shape visual language, and how aesthetic goals in turn influence process. His teaching emphasizes making choices that serve the material itself.

The workshop includes a slide presentation of Hayne’s work alongside historical examples of hand-built ceramics, offering both practical instruction and rich visual context for developing your own surface vocabulary.

Hayne Bayless is a hand-built stoneware potter working in Ivoryton, Connecticut. Largely self-taught, with only brief study in Tokyo and a handful of workshops, he abandoned wheel-throwing early in favor of slabwork and extrusion.

His interest in clay began in high school after discovering an unused wheel and kiln and studying Bernard Leach’s A Potter’s Book. After earning a degree in journalism and spending a decade as a newspaper reporter and editor in New Haven, Bayless left the newsroom in 1992 to pursue pottery full-time.

He has since received top honors at the Smithsonian Craft Show and the Philadelphia Museum of Art Craft Show, and he teaches workshops nationally and abroad.