In a quiet classroom, tables are unevenly shoved together, and each table is lined with a collection of ceramic pots. No one pot looks the same, coming in a range of sizes and shapes. Each blank pot stands proudly waiting for a colorful arrangement of rainbow themed paint.
“What should we paint on them?” a student, taking a Magazine and Feature writing class, asks.
“Whatever you want,” Heather Mae Erickson answered to the class of 13.
As the students painted their pots, they asked questions about her project Pride Pots, and surprisingly opened up about their own lives, sexuality and views.
Erickson is an Associate Professor and Ceramics Area Coordinator in the School of Art and Design at Western Carolina University. She studied crafts and art education at the University of the Arts and MFA from Cranbrook. She studied in the Crafts program and also earned art education pre-certification at the University of the Arts and received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She was also a summer resident at the Archie Bray Foundation and was awarded a Fulbright to study at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland.
Ceramics is Erickson’s passion, but she is also a wholehearted teacher that creates space for her students and wider community to engage in sensitive conversations.
The project Pride Pots: Community Conversations started April 2022, and has since grown to over 400 community painted pots that will be exhibited from April 29 until June 3 during Philly Pride at The Clay Studio, Philadelphia. Erickson was a resident artist at The Clay Studio from 2006 to 2009 while teaching at University of Arts, Rowan, and Arcadia. She is thrilled that the exhibit takes place during the Philly Pride.
“In the studio, I had conversations with myself, and I challenged myself to move beyond mere clay-making and embrace Brene’ Brown’s guideposts and Boyer’s model. The project transformed into an experiential, socially engaged project and has cultivated over twenty-five cultural events with a long list of community partnerships, promoting LGBTQ+ visibility in the local and surrounding communities. Highlighting collaboration at events and upcoming exhibitions builds a powerful bond through creative art-making and storytelling.”
Erickson promoting the exhibition on the studio’s website.
The pots that the class created will be part of the LSU and Hunter Library exhibits.
Her work on Pride Pots began with a piece Erickson calls “Splayed Open,” where she experimented with visually cutting a ceramic vase piece down the middle to display a colorful inside, a reflection of herself and how it feels to hide something like sexuality or gender identity.
Pride Pots started only a few months after Erickson came out as a LGBTQ member to the academic community, during the spring semester of 2020, in the middle of the global COVID-19 lockdown. Suddenly, she was stuck having all of those hard conversations involving coming into your identity by herself. So, she decided she wanted to have these conversations with other people, and pride pots became a community engagement project, instead of one about herself.
“It transformed into a public practice/community engaged project for social action and work on DEIB- diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging,” Erickson said. “It’s not my project, it’s our project.”
Erickson has pulled together a team of students and faculty to help with the effort of the Pride Pot’s Project, including Autumn Hinton, who worked as an intern on the project. Hinton is a Smoky Mountains High School senior who started working with Erickson during the summer of 2022, later transitioning into an internship for high school credit. Hinton slip-cast pots, helped with inventory, and spear headed a few large community Pride Pots painting events.
From left: Autumn Hinton, Jenna Orbeck, Heather Mae Erickson, Daniel Schwendinger. Kneeling is Jen Gordon.
“I found it to be a good way to help others,” Hinton said. “This project is important to me because it helps others have the important community conversations without the pressure, along with being able to create art expressing themselves.”
This community engagement aspect of the project details going to events, such as pride or advocate gatherings, and allowing people to sit, paint a pot in a rainbow fashion, and possibly talk about their own identity with others who chose to sit. All of this is completely free.
The Pride Pots exhibition at The Clay Studio will feature pots painted by all kinds of people throughout the WNC / Southern Appalachian region and will be for sale though the gallery, as well as their website. Proceeds from the community painted pots will be placed into a savings fund to go towards an endowment scholarship to a Master of Fine Arts Studio Arts candidate who is interested in community engagement, service learning, and community engagement.
