Sculpting the Sanctuary: Handbuilding Clay Niches

CoHosted by Saba & Isra: Step away from the screen and into the clay. This session explores the cross-cultural significance of altars and niches—physical spaces designed to hold, frame, and elevate what is sacred to us. We’ll begin by exploring the spiritual and architectural significance of shrines across cultures, drawing from our own family heritage in Indian Sufi traditions, where the structural niche (taq) is viewed as a vessel for inner light. Before touching the clay, we will spend some time reflecting on who or what our individual altars will honor. From there, we will transition into a hands-on workshop to hand-build our own clay niches. We are shaping our forms with a collective future in mind: the individual niches built in this class will be used as the physical canvases for Friday’s projection mapping session with Chika. Our ultimate hope is to bring everyone's illuminated pieces together to create a stunning, collaborative group installation for the final ITP Camp show! What to bring: We encourage you to bring any small personal objects you would like to embed, place within, or use to inspire your shrine (beads, charms, meaningful text, or photos). No prior ceramics experience required