With the majority of Usen Castle set to be torn down starting next semester, the Pottery Club has been searching for a new home — so far to no avail, club leaders say. To raise awareness of their plight, the club staged mock studio hours outside the Shapiro Campus Center on Thursday.

“To me, the Pottery Club is something I’m proud of that I helped create, a place with good people where I’ve felt at home, and an opportunity for those who do not have the time to take an art class because of their courseload,” Club president Marisa Rubel ’17 wrote in an email to the Justice.

When Rubel and a group of friends decided to revive the club two years ago, they invested a good deal of their own time and money in cleaning out the Schwartz Hall studio and starting the club from scratch, she wrote. Funding for clay came from the Student Union Allocations Board.“It was the first time since I had been at Brandeis that I felt like I was doing something worthwhile and that I actually cared about,” she explained. “The studio itself was a place I spent a lot of time and became a second home of sorts.”

With last year’s announcement that the Castle’s C, D and E towers and Schwartz Hall would be torn down in 2017, the club was left searching for a new home. Rubel emailed Dean of Students Jamele Adams over the summer to set up an appointment to talk about the space allocation, and the club was given a temporary studio in the Goldman-Schwartz Art Studios. However, this space will only be available to them for the 2016 to 2017 academic year.

According to Rubel, Adams told her a month ago that he would look for a new space for the club on campus, but she said she has not heard from him since. “I do not really know who actually has the power to relocate us or find us a new space or if that is even happening to be honest. I do not know who makes those decisions. I have interpreted the silence to mean people higher up the totem pole are unaware of the situation or do not care.”

Thursday’s mock studio hours invited students to reflect on what the Pottery Club means to them and to use clay to craft. “Basically since the administration has not given us our own space, the idea was that we were using their space to conduct our club. We were hoping to get the attention of the administration by holding the mock hours to show how many students support us and thus encourage them to find us a new space,” Rubel wrote, though she noted the hours were poorly attended.

While Rubel and many of her fellow club members will be graduating come May, she explained that she is hopeful that the club will be able to find a permanent space before then.

Still, she expressed frustration with the lagging response. “I honestly do not know what else there is that I can do at this point,” she wrote. “I think it has not seemed to those who attend studio hours that anything has been happening, but in reality myself and several members of the e-board have been working tirelessly to get things going.”

“Hopefully the underclassmen will carry on the fight until we have our studio back the way it was — our own place with just our stuff that we do not have to share,” she added.

Adams could not be reached for comment by press time.