For one artist, it took a hurricane to inspire clay couture.

While Lee Renninger’s… For one artist, it took a hurricane to inspire clay couture.

While Lee Renninger’s experience with Hurricane Katrina involved much loss and grief, a long-lasting effect of the incident is a positive one — an art exhibit.

“Threaded Line,” a free exhibit featuring Renninger’s ceramic artwork, will appear in Pittsburgh longer than the Three Rivers Arts Festival.

The exhibit is scheduled to remain in the 709 Penn Gallery from June 5 to July 18, but Renninger’s fashion-inspired ceramic pieces were on display even earlier.

On June 4, the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust’s community engagement department opened the small Downtown gallery for a preview of the exhibit. The event, called “Cake, Couture & Chardonnay,” conveyed the artist’s vision into a party, ushering the exhibit into its six-week stay.

According to the gallery, more than 100 people have visited the show each day.

“We’ve had lots of visitors by way of the Three Rivers Arts Festival, and many people are intrigued by the use of plates,” Veronica Corpuz, public relations director for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, said.

Janis Burley Wilson, the vice president of education and community engagement of the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, approached Renninger about bringing her recent pieces to the city.

“This exhibition is so powerfully beautiful. It’s amazing how Lee uses clay and other materials to create the gorgeous pieces that you will find in this show,” Wilson said.

The exhibition features a handful of Renninger’s couture-themed pieces. She uses ceramics to imitate the appearance of fabric.

“Art is like anything else. It has its own boundaries and constructs. In order to break through and create something new, one has to question the existing paradigms of concept, materials, methods, etc.,” Renninger said in an e-mail.

“Ceramic material is inherently dense and inflexible — qualities that have historically recommended it for utility. The transformation of this material into works that are soft and fluid, as well as visually weightless, is only one way of challenging the long-standing beliefs about clay as an artistic medium,” she said.

But Renninger noted that she did not always use clay, and the fashion-inspired pieces found in “Threaded Line” emerged from another recent development in her artistic career.

She traced the beginning of the exhibit back to 2005, when Katrina devastated her home, work and car in Gulfport, Miss.

During the initial clean-up, Renninger spent every day salvaging what she could from her home and making repairs to her studio — a process that took two years to complete.

She stayed with a couple “kind enough” to take her into their home. At the end of each day, Renninger would return to the couple’s home to settle in bed, watch “Sex and the City” reruns and read Vogue magazine.

“It was my one bright spot in each dark day,” Renninger said.

“After doing all that I could at the home site, I lived for the next year at artist residencies. It was then that I started making fashion related pieces. I wasn’t sure why I was doing it, but it felt right and necessary,” she said. “Later, upon reflection, I saw that it came out of the storm’s aftermath — out of that one bright spot in my day.”

Many of the pieces on exhibit appear to be extravagantly embellished gowns or skirts until a closer look reveals wire, paper and ceramic material.

Renninger has received international recognition for her unconventional use of clay. She earned the

Director’s Award for Innovative Use of Materials from the Fiberarts International: Biennial Exhibition at New York’s Museum of Art and Design.

Corpuz said Renninger’s art has intrigued Pittsburgh, as well.

“Lee’s work is representative of the quality and diversity of artists that we seek to bring to the cultural district,” Corpuz said.

She said the show has been received “very well” and that visitors at the gallery grow quite involved in Renninger’s work.

Mimi Ngokion visited the show Saturday, the last day of the arts festival. Walking toward Point State Park, Ngokion stopped into the gallery on Penn Avenue.

“I didn’t know [the exhibit] was here, but it’s great,” Ngokion said. “I’m kind of shocked. [It’s] strange but beautiful. I can tell it’s clay, but I want to wear it.”

Even though visitors like Ngokion appreciate the strange beauty of Renninger’s work, the artist has

heard a recycled criticism of “Threaded Line.”

While Renninger’s work explores “concepts of personal and political, as well as ethnic and group, identity,” she said she laughs when she’s told her work is too feminine.

“A man would never, and I mean never, be told that his work was too masculine,” she said. “Can you imagine? It just wouldn’t happen.”