Students in RISD Ceramics Course Host Community Event Showcasing Their Work

Students in a spring Ceramics class taught by potter, educator, and curator Seth Rainville shared their work with the community in a late-May event in Providence’s Prospect Park. Throughout the spring semester, the class collaboratively imagined this final showcase while creating individual works.

“It’s a way of bringing students together to group-think what an event or exhibition might look like,” Rainville explains. “Students were dancing, chatting and eating together. It was all I could have hoped for!”

Students brought furniture from home to create an outdoor space for reflection adorned with work made in class. Each student contributed a small vignette centered on eating, drinking, or gathering. Food was served on handmade ceramic plates, encouraging visitors to snack as they moved through the installation. Friends of the class played ambient music nearby, while a miniature mobile gallery built onto the back of a small truck offered tea and additional student work.

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The open-ended structure of the class has encouraged students from across disciplines to shape the project through their own perspectives. Students across majors brought different ideas about space, interaction, and form. “That has been really fun for me,” Rainville says. “They are all coming at it from a different point of view.”

Part of the course’s process extended beyond the RISD campus to local nonprofit industrial art center The Steel Yard, where students learned to fire ceramics in a wood-burning kiln. Midway through the semester, Rainville introduced the class to the unpredictable nature of wood firing, where heat, ash, and weather conditions all influence the final result.

“The fire and flame in the kiln has the last say,” he tells students, explaining the way factors like barometric pressure, temperature, and kiln placement can dramatically alter a piece. “It’s important that you have that experience.”

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Alongside technical instruction, Rainville emphasizes safety, reminding students to wear closed-toed shoes and natural fibers while working around the kiln. “Blue jeans are good at thermal protection,” he says. “And don’t dip anything in water. It will turn into steam, and steam burns are worse than flash burns.”

As the semester progressed, students repeatedly returned to ideas of play, quietness, and escape while developing both their ceramic works and the final event. Some created small handheld figurines and toy-like objects, while others built larger sculptural forms. One Landscape Architecture student produced a series of organic vase forms inspired by natural growth patterns. “They kept bringing up the word play,” Rainville says. “They wanted to make a space where people can get away for a minute.”

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At the end of semester event, a woman visiting from out of state for her daughter’s graduation stopped by to see if any of the pieces were for sale. As she browsed, she came across a small bud vase with a tiny house on top by senior Fiona McGill 26 IL. 

“The woman told us her daughter had been ill for some time,” Rainville explains. “The house on the bud vase made her tear up, and she asked to meet the artist. Fiona was gracious and made the sale confidently. As the teacher of this class, it was a prideful and powerful moment where all of the real-word concepts I hoped they would acquire came to pass.” 

Kaylee Pugliese / Top photo courtesy Seth Rainville)
June 1, 2026