Give yourself the gift of time to play and explore clay’s responsive meditative qualities, while learning and expanding your coil-building, pinching and sculpting skills.  As a species one of our most ancient desires is to pick up earth, dirt, clay and begin to form something with it.  In this daylong in-person hands-on class we will practice a number of different hand-building and meditation techniques utilizing clay’s natural tendency to regulate our nervous systems and return our attention to the present and to our bodies.  All of which supports clay-making by strengthening your intuition, imagination and ability to bring your creative visions into being. Through demonstrations and plenty of time for hands on work, immerse yourself in these meditative, straightforward and flexible processes.

Let’s celebrate the first days of Spring! This is your moment—a time when day and night stand in perfect harmony. Pause for just a moment. Feel the ground beneath your feet, place your hands on the earth and feel the steady pulse. Embrace the energy of renewal and possibility. Together, let’s honor this season of new beginnings and ask ourselves: What’s ready to grow in you? Read More

A practice group to calm the nervous system, cultivate creativity and support the expression of your true nature.

Creativity Collective is a supportive container of people, time and practice that will heighten your personal connection to creativity and help facilitate the process of bringing your creative visions into being. Give yourself the gift of a place and time (on zoom), where we can share our wisdom, encouragement and presence. By setting aside consistent time with others to focus on strengthening your connection with your creativity and your creative practice you will feel increased ease to bring your ideas into fruition. Art making mirrors one’s essence back to oneself. Enabling us to show up to our lives with more grounded presence. What a worthwhile endeavor for us to strengthen and practice with together. Read More

Its vitally important that we become familiar with the mystical aspects of our lives…it is not something we can easily define, nor can we truly understand sacredness until we catch a glimpse of it.*

Just as the natural world is alive with stories, songs, and wisdom, we too can sing matter alive. Let’s come together to make art and explore what it means to imbue an object with our presence, our values, and our deepest feelings. Through creative, imaginal, and somatic practices, we will explore the question(s) of what makes an object sacred.   Read more

Malta’s rich Neolithic archeological treasures are living reminders of our interconnection with those that came before us. In this workshop, ceramic sculptor Erin McGuiness will share her interpretations, images, and research from her month-long residency, where she was immersed in the stone and clay remains of these early settlers (3600 - 2500 B.C.) of the Maltese archipelago.  Small islands of honey colored limestone that arose from the waters of the Mediterranean, the country of Malta sits at the cultural intersection of Europe and Africa.  This ancient land holds the remains of many of our oldest, human-built, free-standing stone structures. These masterpieces of prehistory continue to exhale the breath of the Neolithic Temple Builder culture. An agrarian community whose coherent and complex culture spanned almost 1,000 years and influenced the settlers who came after them; the Phoenicians, Romans, Greeks, Christians and Arabs. In prehistory, a diverse collective of humans discovered a way to peacefully work with the land and with each other to create artistic, spiritual, and technological advancements far ahead of their time.

Erin will guide you through a process of active imagination and hands on creative practices to listen for the whispers of these ancient forbearers. Using simple hand-building techniques, we will make clay replicas of ceremonial and household items from this foundational society. The objects they created and the stone gathering places they built are living libraries whose mysterious stories can be felt with our eyes, hands, intuitions and imagination. Together we will explore the highly developed language of symbols and spaces carved of the island’s native limestone, where the spirals, corpulent figures, birds, rams, bulls, pigs, snakes, and the three-dimensional spaces above and below ground inspire us to ask ourselves so many questions: Did these early people dance, sing, grieve, give birth, die, seek healing and transformation in these spaces and with these objects? How do these rituals resonate with our struggles today? What did they know that can help us navigate our present day challenges?

California based sculptor Erin McGuiness incorporates contemplative practices with art making, working primarily with clay and found objects. She uses hand building processes such as carving and coil building, to create ceramic forms that are totemic, archetypal and play at the intersection of dualities; light and dark, monastic and lush, wild and cultivated. The pieces explore themes of the vessel-as-archetype, divine feminine & masculine, inter-relatedness of forms, ancestral recovery of earth based devotional practices and the animation of matter. Researching the Old European Neolithic culture, she seeks to find cultural roots that pre-date colonization and the suppression of artistic and spiritual practices in which her ancestors were deeply tied to the land, nature and one another in shared community. Ultimately the forms and three-dimensional spaces she creates provide a locus or quiet place where viewers are invited into their own personal form of communion. Her teaching philosophy explores the body as our most important tool in art making and the creation of objects made-by-hand, as a nonlinear process to cultivate myth-making capabilities. Integrating meditation, energy and embodiment exercises into the direct manipulation of earth – clay.

Curiosity and a sense of play activate our innate visioning abilities, while the receptive earthiness of clay keeps us firmly grounded in the present moment. By recreating an object we come to understand it more deeply, seeing its subtlety and feeling a sense of the spirit of the piece and the consciousness of its maker. Through creative practice and using our imagination, workshop participants may unlock the script of these past peoples. Cultivating more understanding of the very ground that contemporary residents and visitors of Malta are blessed to walk on and with. A process to remember and invite into today’s cultural dialogue, the wisdom and life teachings of the original human inhabitants of Malta.

Date: November 11, 2023
Time: 11:00 am - 4:00 pm PT
Duration of workshop: Approximately 4 hours, with a 1 hour lunch break
Materials: Clay
Cost: $185 (includes materials and firing)
Location: Erin McGuiness’ Studio, 2547 8th Street #33, Berkeley, CA

Register for Workshop

Malta’s rich Neolithic archeological treasures are living reminders of our interconnection with those that came before us, our ancestors. In this workshop, ceramic sculptor Erin McGuiness will guide participants through a process of active imagination. A creative practice of listening for the whispers of our ancient forbearers. Using simple hand-building techniques we will make clay replicas of Our Lady of Tarxien, The Sleeping Lady or other ceremonial and household vessels from this foundational society. Without written texts, the objects they created and the stone gathering places they built are living libraries whose mysterious stories can be read with our eyes, hands, intuitions and imagination.

McGuiness will share interpretations, images and research from her month long residency immersed in the stone and clay remains of these early settlers of the Maltese archipelago. Her exploration of the complex language of symbols and spaces carved of limestone; the spirals, female figures, birds, rams, bulls, pigs, goats, snakes and the 3-dimensional spaces above and below ground. Remnants and shards that point the way to answer our questions. Did these early people dance, sing, grieve, give birth, seek healing and transformation in these spaces and with these objects? What resonates with our struggles today, what did they know that can help guide us now?

Re'member Jewelry Collection at West Coast Craft

Please join me at West Coast Craft Market in San Francisco, I will be sharing jewelry pieces from my Re’member Collection. The market brings together 100+ of the best artist and designer craftspeople at a single-day, outdoor market on the Fort Mason Center campus.

Join me for WCC Market SF on Saturday, December 10, from 10am to 3pm.

The Re’ Member Collection, a series composed of pendants, earrings and rings cast in bronze and silver from forms she first creates in clay. The first series in the Re’ Member Collection was inspired by the artist’s time in Skopelos, Greece where the geography and landscape played muse to forms infused with the magic and mystery of the land.

Born from that place, she discovered an intuitive process of conversing with the clay and then carving or excavating the hidden forms within. Objects as symbols celebrating a wild inborn creativity and beacons calling us home to our own sacred bodies and hearts.