As part of the exhibition Terra Poética by Anna Maria Maiolino, MAAT will host a series of ceramics workshops in collaboration with Ceramista Shop, a project dedicated to promoting and appreciating contemporary ceramics in Portugal.

Beginning with a visit to the exhibition, intended to inspire participants, these workshops invite the creation of small clay forms and experimentation with introductory ceramic techniques such as coiling and pinching.

The workshops are open to anyone interested in developing skills in clay modelling, with or without prior experience.

Maiolino states: “I borrowed from potters, bakers, and cooks the initial gestures of their work: kneading, cutting, rolling”*. The repeated gesture – which also evokes familiar moments of preparing pasta (dough) and bread – and the direct contact with this primordial material make visible the time embedded in manual labour and the natural cycle of the earth itself, in constant transformation.

Since the 1980s, Anna Maria Maiolino has developed a vast body of work in clay and other malleable materials, experimenting with processes of transformation, repetition, and resistance, in which making by hand takes on a broad dimension that is at once intimate, feminist, and political.

*Notes from visits by the curators to the artist’s studio in October 2024.

Useful information

Dates: 26/04, 17/05; 21/06; 26/07; 30/08. 

Time: 11.00–13.30

Target audience: Adults, non‑specialist audiences

Duration: 2h30

Language: Portuguese 

Capacity: max. 16 people 

Local: MAAT Gallery (Oval Gallery and Education Centre)

Meeting point: Entrance hall of MAAT Gallery

Price: €15 | 25% discount for MAAT Friends and students (upon presentation of valid ID)

Kindly note: Finished pieces may be collected after firing at the Ceramista Shop in Oeiras, upon prior request by participants who wish to keep their piece.

About Ceramista Shop

Ceramista Shop is a project dedicated to promoting and valuing contemporary ceramics in Portugal. More than a commercial space focused on the sale of materials, clays, tools and equipment, it positions itself as a platform for exchange between makers, audiences and tradition, seeking to bring people closer to manual work and to direct contact with the material itself: earth.

Through workshops, training programmes and collaborations with cultural institutions, Ceramista Shop encourages the discovery of ceramics as an accessible artistic practice deeply connected to human experience. Its tutors are practising ceramists who share technical and creative knowledge in an environment open to experimentation and learning.

Alongside its activities, Ceramista Shop maintains a clear social commitment: to contribute to the development of ceramics in Portugal by supporting the transmission of knowledge, valuing craft practices and fostering new generations of practitioners. By encouraging contact with clay and the fundamental gestures of modelling, it also seeks to create moments of encounter, creativity and reflection on the value of making by hand in the contemporary world.