Hand-Building and Nerikomi Pottery Workshops

The biggest thing to know is the timeline. Since pottery requires careful drying and two rounds of kiln firing to be food-safe, your finished pieces will be ready for collection about 4 to 5 weeks after your session. It takes a little patience, but the result is a piece of art that is actually built to last.

While the potter's wheel gets a lot of attention, hand-building is arguably the most intimate way to work with clay. In these sessions at The Pottery Lab, we slow down. You will learn the three pillars of hand-building: pinching, coiling, and slab work. These techniques allow you to create functional forms like mugs, bowls, and plates directly with your hands. It is tactile, grounding, and lets you focus entirely on the shape emerging from the clay.

Then there is Nerikomi. This is a Japanese technique where we layer and stack different colors of clay before slicing into them to reveal unique, marbled patterns. Unlike painting a design on the surface, the pattern in Nerikomi goes all the way through the clay body. It is essentially creating a piece of art from the inside out.

My studio in Pali Hill is designed to be a quiet oasis in Mumbai. Whether you are coming alone to decompress or with a friend for a creative afternoon, the environment is key to the process. We provide all the professional tools and the clay. You just need to show up ready to get a little messy. By the time we are done, you will have created something entirely your own, which I will then glaze and fire to make durable, waterproof, and food-safe.