Plenty of people, both natives and transplants alike, have told me they’re surprised I’ve been able to find clay in Florida. In some parts of the state, that surprise makes sense. When people elsewhere dig garden beds, their shovels often strike dense, compacted earth. Where I live in Sarasota, we've got sand for days. My neighbors recently dug six feet down to pour a foundation for a carport, revealing striated layers of gray, white, and tan sand, but no clay. In landscapes like this, clay can feel almost nonexistent.
And yet, that absence isn’t universal. Others have found clay and experienced it as abundant, especially once they know where to look. When Tennessee-born potter Mary Ward relocated to Bradenton, Florida in 1915 to start Manatee River Pottery, she was told there was no clay to be found. Nevertheless, she persisted and eventually located a blue-gray deposit along the Manatee River. Florida does have clay. But compared to regions like Appalachia or the Southwest, or even neighboring states like George and Alabama, it is much less abundant, deeper underground and often very sandy.
Clay pit in Ocala, Florida
Edgar Plastic Kaolin (or EPK), a common ceramic glaze ingredient, is mined right here in Florida, in Putnam County at Edgar Minerals. Being a ceramic artist myself, I was surprised to learn that the company is best known for its industrial sand production, and the kaolin clay they extract from the sand comprises the minority of their output. That alone speaks volumes. Florida’s soils are mostly quartz-rich and clay-poor, commercially valued more for their sand than for their plasticity.
When I first began working with wild Florida clays, I was led by the perceived novelty of finding clay in nature and the curiosity that followed. I began to wonder why the clay I was finding here was generally so different from clay I’d found in other places. I did an artist residency in New Mexico in 2024, a landscape decorated with mountains of clay in rainbow variety, standing in such stark contrast to the flat and granular peninsula I now call home. I wanted to understand why it was so different. It's this questioning that led me to deepen my knowledge of Florida's unique geology.
My favorite way to work with wild clay is to turn the small samples I find into decorating slips called terra sigillata (called sig for short). It’s a technique that comes from ancient Rome. You basically liquify clay by blending it with a lot of water and let the solution settle. The coarser particles fall to the bottom and the finest clay particles float near the top. The fine solution on the top is what you collect to decorate pots with. It’s a fascinating process for me because I’m essentially sorting clay by particle size–a detailed exploration of what comprises this ancient soil underneath our feet.
Three examples of terra siglliata made with Florida clays from Central and coastal North Florida. Each one has a different size crackle matrix from bold to fine.
A lot of the Florida clay I’ve worked with makes a sig that crackles when fired--a fragmented, dry shimmer across the surface of the pot. The cracks have a beautifully raw quality, like a dried lake bed or elephant skin. They’ve come to feel like a map of this place: a visual metaphor for our fractured geography, our sinkhole-prone foundation, our porous aquifers and eroding coasts. The fragility of the sig surface mirrors the fragility of the land itself.
It also mirrors the fragmentation happening above ground. Across Florida, development continues to break up wildlife habitats, even as the Florida Wildlife Corridor offers hope for reconnecting some of these landscapes. Just look at the map: the conserved lands exist in discontinuous pieces, scattered throughout the state. Roads, subdivisions, and shopping centers slice through ecosystems, leaving coyotes, panthers, and scrub jays, struggling to move, mate, or migrate. The fragmented surface of the terra sigillata becomes a kind of visual record, each crack a scar left by human expansion, a reminder that the more we divide the landscape, the more we destabilize the life that depends on it.
When I worked with wild clay recently in Roanoke, Virginia, the sig I made was a smooth, vitrified, satin iron red, much like original Roman terra sigillata. I have clay samples from Alabama, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Puerto Rico and beyond, all giving results that have been easy to incorporate into my body of work. But in Florida, even clays that start out gray or orange end up firing to a soft, dull, off-white or pale yellow, often cracking open like old paint.
Jars of terra sigillata made from clays from Tennessee, New Mexico, Louisiana and Puerto Rico, all showing a similar dark iron-red color with a soft satin sheen that is the hallmark look of sig. The sample on the far right is from the shore of Sarasota Bay and is the only instance of a smooth, iron-red sig I've found in Florida so far. These are "normal" sig reuslts.
My favorite result is from a clay I collected in Ocala National Forest, a sandy white clay with traces of iron. When fired, the sig makes a pearly, cracked surface, with the color ranging from off-white to golden light tan depending on what temperature it’s fired to. It’s the most unique sig result I’ve ever gotten. But, why? First, I set out to learn what elements comprise our soil. I’ve learned that Florida’s sand is quartz, worn down over millions of years from the Appalachian Mountains. Beneath that is limestone, made from ancient marine life–epic layers of bone and shell. The basement rock beneath the southern part of the peninsula was once part of Gondwanaland, formerly attached to what’s now West Africa.
The unique results I get when I test Florida clay mirrors its geological uniqueness. We inhabit land that, in geologic terms, was recently an ocean floor. The porosity of sand and limestone create underground aquifers which make Florida home to the largest concentration of magically clear, blue freshwater springs on Earth. I admit, I still don’t understand exactly why the pearly crackle of that Ocala clay terra sigillata occurs. But I think it’s beautiful that making art with native materials led me to a deeper understanding of this land.
A small coil built pot made with commercial earthenware clay, decorated with wild clay terra sigillata from Louisiana and Florida. The smooth brown portions are brushed with the Louisiana clay and the crackled geometric patterned sections are decorated with the Florida clays shown on the test tiles above.
When we start to learn more about nature, many of us begin with plant identification. But those plants grow from soil. Standing at the bottom of a twenty-foot-deep clay pit surrounded by layers of sand, loam, slit and clay feels profound if you’ve spent a lifetime disconnected, taking the ground under your feet for granted. The strata tell an unfathomably long story stretching back hundred of millions of years. The marbled cross section of earth is beautiful but also can be seen as a wound or a scar, a piece of earth dug out for human use. For a couple of years, when they were doing construction on River Road down in North Port, fossil hunters would congregate at the bottom of the construction pits. We’d marvel at their fossils and then ask if they’d seen any clay. It was like a playground down there, all of us fascinated by what time immemorial had left behind.
This is a clay sample collected from Ten Thousand Islands off the coast of Naples, Florida. It's a funky marine clay that was unpleasant to process. The circle on the left is unfired, the sample on the left is fired. This gray to off-white transformation is a common result, one I've gotten from different clays collected from Central to South Florida.
A couple of years ago, I formed a relationship with a state-run institution to exchange my clay samples for data. My samples would help them with their research and, in return, I would receive chemical analyses to help me learn more about the clay I was finding. Unfortunately, the raw data I received was odd—from inexplicably high argon and chlorine content to missing elements like magnesium and sodium. I had them test a clay that was light orange in color before firing and pale yellow to off-white when fired to cone 5. According to the data sheet, this clay had very high iron content, but high-iron clays typically fire to some variation of orange or reddish brown. I just couldn't align the data with my experience working with the clay. Fortunately, I had access to an expert who confirmed my observations. A ceramic engineer I reached out to, Dr. Bill Carty, explained that the scan I’d received was likely flawed—an uncorrected XRF analysis not meant for complex materials like clay. He reminded me that XRF, while useful in some contexts like painting conservation, often struggles to yield reliable results for ceramics unless performed under very specific and controlled conditions.
That experience ended up reinforcing something I was already beginning to believe: my own senses—touch, observation, and experience in the kiln—were proving more reliable than scientific data that didn’t seem to match what I was seeing. Over time, I’ve come to attribute the strange results of my Florida sigillata to the clay’s naturally high silica content and the behavior of montmorillonite clays common in Florida soils. The inches of fine sand at the bottom of my terra sigillata solution and its often gel-like quality, its unwillingness to fit uniformly over my clay body—all of these observations have taught me more than a spreadsheet ever could. It was a reminder that not everything needs to be quantified to be understood.
I’ve also looked to our Indigenous history for clues about our clay. It’s tough to make a strong pot out of very sandy clay and I wanted to know how different Indigenous groups dealt with the challenge. In Southwest Florida, the Calusa made pottery, but their material culture was adapted to a coastal life–shell mounds, wooden tools, fishing technologies. In regions where high-quality clay was scarce, pottery wasn’t always the center. Seashells, which are abundant along the coast, serve as natural tools and utensils. The Calusa had to innovate unique ways to make up for the limited workability of South Florida clay by adding cattail fluff and sea sponge. However, the archaeological record shows that they often traded for higher quality pottery from other parts of Florida. Of the pots that were made by Indigenous South Floridians, mostly shards remain. The pots were so fragile that finding pots intact is extremely rare. A great source of information about our Indigenous ceramic history can be found through the University of Florida Museum pottery types gallery.
Indigenous pottery shards from the University of Florida Gainesville collection
Working with wild clay has made me pay attention in a way I never had to with commercial materials. Processing clay into terra sigillata brings an awareness of soil at a granular level; I’m essentially sorting clay by particle size. Sometimes I can see the layers forming in a glass jar. When they aren’t clearly defined, I dip my finger in to feel where the coarse layer ends and the silky layer of fine clay begins. It’s an intimate experience with the Earth.
In forming a relationship with the material, you get something deeper than mastery. You get intimacy. You get a conversation with the land itself, one that bypasses language and goes straight to touch. I don’t know if that kind of relationship can heal the planet—at least not in a world where governments and corporations still prioritize profit over the health of the environment. But I do believe that building a more intimate connection with the earth is personally transformative. It brings us into deeper alignment with the rest of creation, and that kind of transformation has its own quiet power. It may not overturn systems overnight, but it changes the way we live, make, consume, and relate. I believe that shift matters.
