- I found that I needed to be working on hopeful things, whimsical things, things that would bring about a smile.

(gentle music) Folk art has an appeal to me.

I like the, just the groundedness of the folk art.

And so I tried to apply the whimsy with folk art and come up with a lot of what I do.

Maybe my magnum opus would be the "Nashville Clayscape."

And that idea came from a call for an art project out at the airport.

And so just brainstorming on it I ended up coming up with the idea of tiles with iconic Nashville locations on it.

And, you know, I proposed that it would adorn the columns they were trying to do.

Well, I didn't get that call, but I couldn't let go of the idea.

Over the next three years I did the "Nashville Clayscape."

It was the biggest thing I'd done before and it really taught me a lot.

And I think it has shaped a lot of who I am now.

So the inspiration was a call that I didn't get.

It's 192 tiles, it measures 8 feet tall by 25 feet.

The majority of it is one foot square tiles.

I just thought I was gonna sit down and make tiles.

And once I got started listing some of the key places I needed to have on this map, then I realized, oh, you know, this is gonna be a little bit bigger than I thought.

It's not gonna be six months.

(Tammy chuckles) This is gonna be a little bit bigger.

I really had fun with the research, the computer, Google Images, Google Street View.

These were things that became really important.

Now, some things I did a drive by, I did photos, but most of them I ended up leaning on what I could find on the internet for how I would do these particular buildings on each tile.

I think one of my favorite things is to be down there when somebody comes and they, either they didn't know it was there or they came to see it, but they did not expect what they found.

People just stand there.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] This NPT Arts Break is made possible by the generous support of the Martha Rivers Ingram Advised Fund of The Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, and a grant from the Tennessee Arts Commission.