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Helena Lacy (b. 1991) is a London-based ceramic artist working across sculpture and sculptural furniture. Her practice explores material transformation, home, memory and storytelling. Pattern plays a central role in her work, inspired both by forms created through natural movement and those embedded in print. Balancing structure with unpredictability, Lacy uses experimental glazing and printing techniques to explore the tension between flow and form.
Lacy’s thinking is also shaped by an ongoing interest in found objects and ceramic fragments. Broken pottery shards are understood as traces of lives once lived, carrying layered stories of ownership, origin and imagery. Each fragment holds multiple narratives at once: who used it, where it came from, and what its surface once depicted. These layered remnants inform her approach to pattern, distortion and storytelling, where meaning is never singular but accumulated over time.
Re-print is a series that examines how ceramic surfaces preserve and obscure storytelling. The work originated from observing image distortion in water reflections, where patterns momentarily surface within constant movement. These reflections - understood as a form of living print, unstable and continuously rewritten, became a starting point for translating fluid images into fixed ceramic forms.
Using a glaze-printing method developed during her MA at the Royal College of Art, Lacy layers and reinterprets classical blue and white porcelain imagery, one of the most recognisable print traditions in ceramics, rich with embedded histories. Through layering, repetition and image distortion, hidden narratives are brought to the surface, allowing familiar motifs to shift, fragment and overlap. In doing so, the work reflects how stories are remembered and retold, echoing the shifting nature of memory and storytelling.
The series reflects Lacy’s interest in hidden narratives and the ways memory and place become embedded within objects. Through a tension between flow and form, created by repetition and fluid movement within the kiln, Re-print invites reflection and the quiet power of material storytelling.
Lacy holds an MA in Ceramics & Glass from the Royal College of Art (2024) and a BA (Hons) in Technical Arts and Special Effects from Wimbledon College of Art (2014). Her work has been exhibited at New Designers Selects, Caroline Fisher Projects, Selfridges, Mint Gallery, Thrown Gallery, London Craft Week, London Design Festival, and Paris Design Week. A finalist in the Liberty Open Call, she has completed residencies in Japan, Germany, and Finland, and was awarded Artist in Residence at the Sarabande Foundation (2024–2025). Her work has been featured in House & Garden, Colour Hive, The Wick, Emerging Potters, Apollo, Architectural Digest, ShowStudio, and A2Z Fashion Magazine. She will present her first solo exhibition in 2026 and exhibit with Caroline Fisher Projects and House of Bandits at Collect Art Fair.
