WWWADING - Workshop: Making and Decorating Clay Plates with Foraged Rust

About the workshop

We will be making stoneware plates using molds. Participants are asked to bring their own plates to mold from if they’d like (Esme will provide alternatives too). We will roll out sheets of clay and drape them into our chosen mold.

Using different slips stained with rust foraged from the boat on the canal and the towpath itself, we will then decorate these plates using traditional slipware techniques such as inlay, sgraffito, slip-trailing, and feathering. Historically, slipware plates often featured folkloric imagery; we will try to use our own watery folklore stories to reflect the rust-based materials.

Esme will take the finished greenware plates and fire them in her studio in Wood Green. Participants will be able to collect and take home their fired plates within one month from the date of the workshop.

Esme is a boater and maker who works with found clay and materials. Her objects try to remember their past; with these, she urges us to do the same.

About WWWADING

We’re cruising, surfing, hoping we don’t freeze. We’re World Wide Wading. Pushing on, downstreaming, off-grid, at the mouth of the river, where we live.

WWWADING, by artist and boater Aisha Mirza, is an analogue photography project, performance essay, oral history archive, and interspecies sound work sharing the stories of queer, racialised and disabled people, spirits, and other creatures living and playing off-grid on boats across London’s canal network (2020–present).

This is part memoir, part poem, part diasporic residue, part “mental health” in the apocalypse, part investigation: of the marsh as post-capitalist survival technology, the river as trans futurity, the canal as waterlogged footprint of colonisation, and the boat as go-bag, as radical pursuit of pleasure.

May pearls lie within. May they set us all free.

WWWADING is presented by Canal Dream CIC in collaboration with Global Generation, with funding from Unlimited.

About Canal Dream CIC

Canal Dream (CD) is a non-profit arts and cultural organisation based on London’s canals and rivers. CD positions art and creativity as catalysts for canal regeneration and social innovation. We use waterways as maps and boats as spaces to curate site-specific arts and culture programmes. Beyond the arts, we collaborate with cross-sector partners to co-create a waterway-based social innovation network. Our vision is to transform London’s historic canals into a living cultural corridor — a flowing space for regeneration, creative practice, and community connection. Follow our instagram for regular updates on our activity.

About Global Generation

Global Generation is an environmental education charity with garden sites located throughout London. We offer activities such as urban food growing, supporting bees, carpentry, cooking, storytelling, creative writing, performance and more. We aim to create the conditions for people to come together, connect with themselves, others and their local area and to practically and creatively contribute to ecological and social change. Tickets are priced on a sliding scale, and we encourage those who can, to pay it forward. We have a donation option where you can put money towards supporting the work we do including offering free spaces for community members. Follow our instagram for regular updates on our activity.

About Unlimited

Unlimited commission, fund and promote disabled-led work. We work with disabled artists to support and further their work and career. The artists with whom we work are changing the world.

About the Space and Accessibility: The Floating Garden is a barge moored along the Regents Canal near Coal Drops Yard with views of the surrounding area. There is an indoor classroom space on the barge so the session will go ahead rain or shine. The barge is not yet completely wheelchair accessible - there is a set of stairs that lead directly to the mooring or lifts that give access to the towpath, however there is one step required to get from the towpath to the barge and steps from the main deck area to the toilet. Please speak to the team if you have specific accessibility questions.