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, with pattern playing a central role. Inspired by patterns formed through natural movement and those embedded in print, she uses experimental glazing and printing techniques to balance structure with unpredictability. An ongoing influence is her interest in found objects and ceramic fragments, understood as traces of lived experience carrying layered stories of ownership, origin and place.

These ideas are central to Re-print, a series examining how ceramic surfaces preserve and obscure storytelling. Originating from observations of image distortion in water reflections, understood as a form of living, unstable print, the work translates fluid imagery into fixed ceramic forms. Drawn to blue and white porcelain as one of the most recognisable traditions of print within ceramics, and for its long history of visual storytelling, Lacy uses a glaze-printing method developed during her MA at the Royal College of Art to layer and reinterpret familiar motifs, allowing them to fragment and overlap.

This interest in blue and white porcelain and the stories embedded within its imagery later took Lacy to Jingdezhen, China, historically renowned for its porcelain production and central to the development of blue and white ceramics. While there, encounters with broken ceramic shards found throughout the city led to What the Bowl Holds, a series exploring the fragments of stories carried by everyday objects. This research has since developed into Layered Traces, which draws on Shanshui-inspired imagery from her time in China. Across these works, Lacy considers how objects and their surfaces can hold traces of memory and place, how stories shift as they are preserved, fragmented and retold, 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 Collect Art Fair, New Designers Selects, Sotheby’s, Selfridges, London Craft Week, London Design Festival and Paris Design Week. A finalist in the Liberty Open Call, she has completed residencies in China, Japan, Germany and Finland, and was Artist in Residence at the Sarabande Foundation (2024–2025). Her work has been featured in Homes & Gardens, Livingetc, Ceramic Review, Colour Hive, The Wick, Emerging Potters, Apollo, Architectural Digest, SHOWstudio and A2Z Fashion Magazine.