When you walk into the Morean Clay Center, which is housed inside a renovated 1926 railway freight depot in St. Petersburg, the first thing you notice is a white wall covered with handprints in varying shades of brown. It's reminiscent of cave paintings.
Around the room on cement pedestals and wall shelves you'll see hand sculptures, little clay animals and representations of transgender bodies.
Instructor Dakota-Joan Parkinson said more than 60 transgender and gender-noncomforming students were challenged to connect themselves to a sense of history using the timeless medium of clay.
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“A lot of my teaching was focused on historical ceramics. A, because, like, there is no civilization without ceramics. And B, like, trans people are so often erased from cultural context,” Parkinson said.
“So through clay, we can connect to the past and rebuild a past for ourselves to use now and to use in the future, right? And then speaking to historical reference, and also my own penchant and interest in, like, performance art, we created this wall situation with different colored clay slips, so it's an ephemeral piece that will be gone at the end of this exhibit. But I was inspired by old hand cave paintings, and just going back to that idea of connecting ourselves to historical context that we were erased from.”
The exhibit, "trans/clay/body," is the culmination of several months' work by artists age 18 to 24, and what they learned in free ceramics classes made possible through a grant project with Creative Pinellas and the National Endowment for the Arts.
“If you don't see yourself in history, you can reach out and create that history, and you can work with a group and also make that happen,” Parkinson said.
Parkinson said the art process was topped off with a historical anagama wood firing – a 2,000-year-old method of making pottery – in a giant kiln. It involves putting wood into a kiln every five minutes for about 56 hours.
“It's hot; it's labor intensive, and it takes a whole village to make it come together,” Parkinson said. “So I thought it would be very poetic and very beautiful to bring a village of trans folk together and then work in tandem with the greater Tampa Bay ceramic community to fire all of the work that we made.”
Another piece in the exhibit is a kiln altar created by the students as almost a performance piece.
“There's a bit of a history of making offerings to a kiln,” Parkinson said. "One firing could represent three months of work for 20-plus to 100 people, depending how big the kiln is, right? So it behooves you to engage in a little bit of superstition, right?”
Students were asked to bring in their offerings, which included candles, a bottle of wine, food and little figurines, and even a testosterone bottle filled with period blood.
“So we set that out. We lit candles. We said some words. We lit the kiln,” Parkinson said.
And it must have worked, because hundreds of people have come through to visit the exhibit.
Additionally, Parkinson said, one of the highlights of the past few months was giving her students an experience she never had: learning from a trans teacher.
“I kind of wanted to be that for somebody out there, you know. And I thought that was a really cool thing. Also, I'm really proud of my students who took this as an opportunity, form a powerful connection with their work.”
The exhibit runs through April 27 at the Morean Clay Center, 420 22nd St. S., St. Petersburg. Learn more here.
