Likkle But Tallawah: Part One — The Alchemist at the Wheel

“Ostinato Rigore”

Stubborn rigour. Relentless precision. — Leonardo da Vinci

“We Likkle But We Tallawah”

We are small, but we are mighty. — Jamaican proverb

In fifteenth-century Florence, the alchemists of art did not go to a shop for their colours. They made them. They ground lapis lazuli into ultramarine blue with a patience that bordered on religious devotion. They extracted crimson from dried insects. They mixed lead with vinegar until it became the white that could hold light on a painted surface. The Renaissance was built, in part, on the radical belief that if the material you needed did not exist, you made it yourself.

Leonia Mckoy has never been to Florence. But she harvests clay from under the bridge at Harbour View. She collects wood ash from local barbecues and slurry from a stone quarry in St. Thomas. She transforms what others call waste into glazes that reflect light the way the old masters understood light — as something alive, something with direction and intention.

The impulse is identical. Five centuries apart, two cultures, one philosophy: if you want something to exist, you make it from the earth beneath your feet.

The Seed: Drawing Things Into Being

The first time Leonia understood the power of her own hands, she was ten years old. Every girl at Mico Practicing All-Age wanted the store-bought Barbie paper dolls — the glossy ones, the ones that smelled like plastic and possibility. Leonia couldn’t have them. So she and a classmate sat down and made their own. Not just the clothes. The dolls themselves. Every curve, every expression, built from scrap paper and complete concentration.

“I realised that if I wanted something to exist, I could draw it into being.”

Da Vinci kept notebooks. Thousands of pages of observation, study, and private obsession — the record of a man who believed that everything could be understood if you looked at it long enough and hard enough. Leonia’s notebooks were those scrap paper dolls. The beginning of a lifelong practice of making the world yield to her vision.

Edna Manley and the Encounter with Clay

A teacher named Mrs. Dunn saw something in Leonia that Leonia hadn’t yet dared to imagine for herself. She pointed her toward Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. It was there, in the foundation program, that Leonia met clay for the first time. And everything else fell away.

“The moment I touched it, everything else — the pencils, the paint, the paper — fell away. Ceramics wasn’t just about making; it was about a physical conversation.”

— Leonia Mckoy

What she describes is the same encounter every great Renaissance sculptor describes. Clay is not passive. It records every thumbprint, every hesitation, every decision made under pressure. It is, she says, “the weight of the earth, the resistance of the material.”

And then there was the kiln — the fire that changes everything. Seeing a piece go in grey and brittle and emerge permanent, stone-hard, wholly transformed. “That transformation changed my soul.”

The Florentines understood fire too. The kiln was sacred to them. Majolica, the tin-glazed earthenware that became one of the Renaissance’s most celebrated art forms, required the same surrender to combustion — the same trust that the fire would do what the artist could not. Leonia and the Renaissance potters of Florence are in the same lineage, separated by five centuries and an ocean, united by the same understanding of what it means to let earth and fire make something together.

The Butterfly Series: Jamaica as a State of Becoming

Her current body of work, the Butterfly Series, is inspired by the Papilio homerus — Jamaica’s rare Swallowtail butterfly. It is her most personal work yet. Transformation and resilience, embodied in the rarest living thing the island produces.

She speaks about the Jamaican Diaspora with a tenderness that reaches across oceans: “When someone in London or New York holds one of my pieces, I want them to feel that home isn’t a place they left behind. I want them to feel that Jamaica is a state of becoming.”

Becoming. The Renaissance had a word for it — rinascita, rebirth. The idea that a culture could awaken to its own potential and produce, in a concentrated burst of creative energy, work that would outlast every political and economic force that surrounded it.

That is what Leonia Mckoy is doing at the wheel, at 3 a.m., before the house wakes up. She is not making pottery. She is making the evidence that Jamaica is in the middle of its own rinascita.

We likkle. But we tallawah. And in her hands, the earth proves it.

Own a Piece of Jamaica’s Renaissance

Shop Brand Leonia’s Art ceramics in-store at Devon House, JBDC Corporate and Norman Manley International Airport, or online at thingsjamaicanshopping.com.

From the artisan’s hand to yours.

Next in the series: Part Two — Devon Garcia and the wood that doesn’t forgive.

Editorial Team

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