The Clay Lady encompasses several different ventures. The Clay Lady’s Campus is a place — a seven-building site on Lebanon Pike. There’s the Clay Lady Way, a method of firing clay often used in elementary schools. And then there’s the Clay Lady herself — Danielle McDaniel.
Since McDaniel took her first pottery class through Metro Parks and Recreation in 1981, her empire has grown to include 85 on-premise artists with private studios and 800 pottery and sculpture students. She bought what would become The Clay Lady’s Campus in 2007, and it has steadily grown, including the recent addition of 16,000 square feet of studios to accommodate demand for her classes — which tend to sell out promptly. With the addition, McDaniel’s Mid-South Ceramics supply store tripled in size — the gallery space for artists doubled too.
But perhaps the most impressive figure related to the Clay Lady is 80 percent — that’s the retention rate for her students.
“Since we have such a high retention rate, when we were building I really kept them in mind, because I wanted them to have a studio worthy of the level that they’re reaching in their artist lives,” McDaniel tells the Scene.
Early in her career, McDaniel taught at elementary schools. She’s now teaching the grandchildren of some of her first students.
The feeling of starting a project and not liking the way it’s turning out is something that plagues adult artists just the same as elementary students. One of McDaniel’s gifts is giving the right reassuring word or technique to help her students stay grounded.
“You’re not an artist because you made something,” McDaniel says. “You’re an artist because you were willing to take the chance to try to make it.”
She says clay has taught her to enjoy life’s processes instead of focusing so much on “arriving” at a final product.
“There was something special about it, because if you mess it up, you just wad it up and start again,” she says of the appeal of making pottery. “It was just this complete forgiveness.”
McDaniel bought the campus with the simple desire to have her own studio for making pots and mugs. But the teaching realm is where she finds herself most often these days. While she reserves three weeks per year for a pottery “sprint” to create her own work, she’s fulfilled by wandering through the studios and seeing what her students and fellow artists are up to. She still teaches the center’s $50 “Try It!” classes. McDaniel has also gained respect in the art-teacher world through her instructional books and VHS tapes, the latter of which eventually evolved to DVDs and YouTube videos.
The traditional way to create a clay piece is to make the piece, fire it on a low temperature, glaze and decorate it, and fire it again at a higher temperature. McDaniel condenses the process with a special formula of glaze that makes only one firing necessary. McDaniel points out that her method of firing is not new — it’s the way people fired pots for thousands of years, because there wasn’t a two-firing method when Indigenous people were originally making pots.
“The art teachers really liked it, because the traditional way was very labor-intensive for them,” she says. “To be honest, it was just what had been done forever and ever. I think what I did is I just put some new life into it and made it more fun.”
The Clay Lady is a philosophy too, as McDaniel wrote about in her 2021 book The Clay Lady’s Lesson Book. The philosophy hinges on the idea that if all people are made in the image of the creator, they are creators too — not just creations.
She thinks part of the appeal of her campus is that people need what’s known as a third place, where they aren’t known for their family or work role and can be themselves.
“I think that when we’re in that flow, we’re really being true to ourselves in more of a way than anywhere else, because there’s no masks or filters when you’re just you and the clay at the potter’s wheel,” McDaniel says. “I think we’re all craving that. Truly, we’re craving being centered and grounded, and pottery is the quickest way to get there.”
