This week-long ceramics intensive with internationally-acclaimed Spanish artist-instructor Alberto Bustos offers an immersive experience that brings together material practice, landscape, and reflection. Designed for all levels of students and practicing artists, the course invites participants to focus, work attentively, and engage clay as both medium and language.
Grounded in Bustos’ self-taught practice and a lifelong attraction to nature, the workshop is informed by the concept of natuRareza—a return to our elemental essence through direct contact with earth. Participants will explore ceramics as a means of expressing emotional and ecological narratives, responding to the visible and invisible impacts of environmental degradation through form and surface.
The primary focus of the course is hand-building without conventional tools. By working directly with the hands, participants develop an immediate, physical relationship with the clay, allowing intuition and sensation to guide the process. Using the “launch” technique, students will create textured slabs, as well as flat, square, and rectangular filaments that serve as structural and expressive elements.
Surface development is approached experimentally and holistically. Participants will create stone-like textures using pigmented clay “cookies” and apply pigments, glazes, powders, and liquids directly onto wet clay using brushes, toothbrushes, strainers, and other simple implements. These layered applications are designed to achieve depth, nuance, and complexity in a single firing.
Bustos encourages the use of unconventional materials—cardboard, sponges, baking paper, aluminum foil, plastic wrap—combined with clay, glass, pigments, and glazes in both powder and liquid form.
This workshop is ideal for participants seeking a focused, materially rich studio experience within a historically and environmentally resonant setting—one that supports experimentation, thoughtful making, and a renewed connection to place and process.
Throughout the workshop, participants will be housed in the remarkably well-preserved Umbrian hill town of Monte Castello di Vibio. Your workshop package is all-inclusive, providing welcome and departure services and airport transfer from the Rome Fiumicino, Leonardo Da Vinci Airport (FCO) aboard our comfortable private bus. Single occupancy accommodations with shared bath (a wide range of upgrades with private bath are available), 3 meals per day Monday-Thursday, Prosecco brunch and dinner on Saturday and Sunday (no meals are served on Friday, our excursion day. Your workshop includes one excursion per week and many additional options are available on weekends for an additional fee. Of course, 24/7 access to facilities and 24/7 bi-lingual support are provided.
