Skip to content
Recess homepage

Event

Community Brick Making and Soil Altars

Marcela Torres and Assembly

Date:
December 16, 2023, 2:00 – 4:00pm

Join us to build a soil altar in celebration of Lenapehoking and the daily care it provides for us. Together we will use natural clay from Denniston Hill (Glen Wild, NY) and ENGN Civic Creative Space (Callicoon, NY) to make clay bricks from wooden molds. Once formed we’ll stack and mortar bricks to create an altar to hold ceramic pieces made by the Recess collective. Brick making is a building technique used in every culture and called by different names, whether cobbs or adobe. The uniqueness of brick depends on each location's specific ecosystem and what type of weather the structure will have to endure. Bricks are made of different recipes and shapes, and are fired or naturally dried. It's one of the most simple and culturally unifying manners of building.! In this drop-in program we will be using a very simplified method of forming clay to rectangular shape and stacking to build a floral table structure/altar.

Wear clothing you can comfortably work in and get dirty. In this process there are different roles, some requiring lifting, stomping or smoothing. Come prepared with a good sense of your body and level of your participation.