Imogen Lycett Green meets ceramicist Kelly Jessiman

Tentatively, Kelly Jessiman opens the door of her terraced house in St. Leonards-on-Sea. Is it a good idea to let a journalist into her family home which, in our introductory emails back and forth, she has described as chaos? Kelly with her brown eyes as round as saucers and long dark hair, is dressed in black jeans and Birkenstocks. She is tiny. After I give her my widest, most reassuring smile, she leads me through a hall piled high with shoes and coats and bits of toys, past an enormous bathroom with a roll-top bath and billowing six-foot house plants. We go down some stairs into a kitchen where we weave around three white plastic bales as huge as tall fridges. “It’s packing for my pots,” says Kelly, apologetic. “It just arrived and I don’t know where to put it.”

The round clay vessels she makes live on kitchen shelves, alongside books and teapots and pictures and plates. They are immediately arresting, so generous and human. So pleasing. You want to touch them, hug them, hold them. There is an unglazed two-foot-high clay orb with wavy handles in the middle of the scrubbed pine table. The packing in the white bales will be used to wrap these vases, her candlesticks, plates and bowls to keep them safe on their way to private homes (commissions), to McCully & Crane her gallery in Rye, to the Charleston shop, and to high-end interior design outlets in London. One of these shops sells her bigger vases – together, we look up their website – for two thousand pounds. Kelly has made it on to House & Garden’s 25 rising stars 2025. Kelly has made it, period.

But how?

The floorboards all through the house are stripped and scuffed by running children, the understairs cupboard is painted blue and red and yellow, scrawled over in pencil and marker pen. Here, the pram is not just in the hall. The pram is in your face as you are working. She works here in the kitchen, where we sit down. Isn’t her ceramic art a little precarious in here? “We have a dog, he chased the cat, and she jumped up onto the shelf and landed on a pot, which came crashing down.” It sounds just like Dr. Seuss. Kelly laughs. “Then another time, my middle daughter jumped on my back as I was carrying a pot from the studio. It smashed.”

On cue, a three-foot high, merle-coloured lurcher with eyes like David Bowie, one brown, one blue, bounds into the kitchen, all legs. He is followed at a run by Jamie, Kelly’s partner and father of their three children. Jamie shouts: “Sorry! Don’t let him jump up!”

“This is Tarot,” says Kelly, watching the dog with some amusement. Jamie lets Tarot into the wild, narrow, sloping garden – full of long grass and blossom – to chase squirrels.

Jamie has taken the afternoon off his work as a music promoter – and curator of Strummerville, a stage and area at Glastonbury Festival – to corral the dog and their youngest child, Laszlo (six), while we talk. Laszlo is autistic PDA, as is their thirteen-year-old first-born daughter, Nixie, whose autism recently had her struggling to do everyday tasks like getting dressed or leaving the house Now she is healing from this period of ‘autistic burnout’ and is beginning to make steps into friendships beyond the family home. Their ten-year-old middle daughter, Aurora . goes to the primary school at the end of the road, but it is now the Easter holidays, so I can hear the two girls moving about upstairs.

“It’s been a hard few years and playing with clay is a way of coping when everything else around me seems to have gone to shit.” While working, Kelly listens to electro-punk by Fat Dog or Saharan rock by Etran de l’Aïr, losing herself in the ‘mud’, as she calls it, moulding shapes with her hands, eyes closed. “I can do it when the kids are screaming, it’s meditative. I don’t call myself a potter or even a ceramicist, I just play with clay.”

She ruminates: “In this world of AI and technology, I think there is a human appetite for life force, for things that are hand-made and hand-shaped. The same thing happened after the industrial revolution, with Arts and Crafts.” If the Arts and Crafts movement in Britain in the late 19th century was a reaction against mechanisation, it also challenged the low status of the decorative arts. Which does Kelly think her work is, art or craft, and does it even matter? “I hate that it matters to me, but I do care,” she says. “My pieces selling in a shop is great, making work for galleries makes me really happy.”

For Kelly Jessiman, art is an expression in the moment that is not repeated, yet in the act of making she recognises she follows in a long line of global ceramic tradition. The arm reaches to her practice here from the Pre-Columbians who influenced her role model, Venezuelan-born Magdalena Suarez Frimkess, via the Ancient Egyptians who inspired another of her influences, South African Hylton Nel. Inherent in ceramic art is both tradition and defiance. Echoing Yanagi Sōetsu, the founding father of the Japanese folk craft movement and author of The Beauty of Everyday Things – written in 1926, now republished as a Penguin Classic – Jessiman says: “I want to be free to make whatever comes up, but I also love that people use my pieces to hold things in – flowers, food, milk. Why can’t toasters and kettles be beautiful? We live with them every day.”

She doesn’t turn clay on a wheel, but instead rolls long coils by hand, snaking them round and round, smoothing them in. Once she has the shape and handles of a vessel, she dries it slowly in a bag, so that the handles do not crack before the body is dry. Then the piece is glazed and fired. Through the back door, at the end of the garden, past a huge magnolia in resplendent flower, is a corrugated iron studio – “built by friends, it’s falling apart” – where Kelly has her kiln. The kiln is as round and deep as a witch’s cauldron. There are pots everywhere, on every surface and covering the floor. She would work here but usually she needs to be in the house with the children. She paints, squiggles and writes on her ceramic creations: “That part is a horrible mixture of indecisiveness and spontaneity. But once it’s in the kiln it’s out of my control. It will turn out how it turns out. Using clay is a big lesson in letting go.”

Letting go has been necessary for Kelly. In her gentle voice, with its faint Croydon twang, she says plainly: “My dad was schizophrenic, he took his own life. There was so much shame around it then, I couldn’t talk about it, but i think its important to be open about suicide so that people dont feel so alonel.” After her father died, Kelly’s mum worked three jobs – in McDonald’s, at the cheese factory and as a cleaner – to keep Kelly and her brother Ryan afloat, until Kelly’s Irish grandmother, her father’s mother, stepped in.

“My nan started the Eveline Day Nurseries in South London. My dad’s side never really accepted my mum, who is Swiss, and had come over as an au pair and had us children very young. With the money my grandparents made from the nurseries, they sent me to a Catholic boarding school in Hertfordshire, run by nuns and priests. Kelly was an altar girl, but a bad one. “I was smoking at ten, doing Ouija boards and I was kicked out after I ran away as a dare, and blamed it on a priest. So for sure I’m going to Hell.” She chuckles.

Kelly was diagnosed dyslexic. She says, “I only learnt to read properly by reading to my own children. I started on fairytails and now we’re on chapter books!” She’s reading Grimwood by Nadia Shireen to Laszlo, The Last Bear by Hannah Gold to their middle daughter and The Good Thieves by Katherine Rundell to their eldest. She exclaims with glee: “Finally, I can read!”

“I’ve always been outspoken,” says Kelly. Kelly fought back against any kind of control. After the nuns, she was sent to Millfield to help with her dyslexia one of the most exclusive boarding schools in the country. “My grandmother called sending us to Millfield ‘an investment’, but I didn’t want to be an investment. I remember thinking, so you go to school, get a 9-5 job and then you die? What’s the point?” She only lasted a few years at Millfield, but after sixth form college in Kingston, she did get a job, blagging her way onto the payroll at Marks & Spencer as a ‘visual merchandiser’.

“I struggled at school, art has always been my thing. I did Art GCSE early, at thirteen, and it was my art teacher who gave me confidence” So after she left M&S, she applied to the foundation course at Chelsea School of Art, got herself a student loan and moved out. A BA in fine art sculpture at Camberwell followed, but Kelly still felt she wasn’t getting the point. “Art school was terrible, too! I didn’t feel like I fitted in. Conceptual art was still the in thing at art school. We never touched clay.’ She graduated, but stopped doing art and blagged more jobs – as an interior designer, as a stylist for a US rapper, working in a bar – while dancing the night away in clubs. “I felt like a misfit, and only when I met other misfits, on the music scene, did I find people that got me”

She met Jamie and they had a daughter, but it was impossible to continue in London. “We were in Hackney 15 years ago, but then the artisan coffee shops moved in and the rent went up. We couldn’t afford it.” She and Jamie came to Sussex on a whim. “We’d been up all night at a party and someone said, ‘there’s a pagan festival in Hastings today’ so we came down.” It was Jamie who gave her a pottery course as a gift in 2020. “He saw that, without creating, I was miserable.” She put her pots on Instagram and was noticed by Nathaniel Hepburn at Charleston, which is how she came to the attention of a wider audience. Now her brother, a tattoo artist with a three year old, has moved to Hastings too. And, recently, Kelly helped set her mother up nearby.

Tarot, returned from the garden, nibbles at the Kibble bag which sits next to his tin bowl. Kelly scoops out a portion and tips it into the bowl. He swallows the Kibble in one mouthful and asks gently to be fed again. Kelly feeds him five times before the dog goes to lie by the French windows. “I’m amazed,” she says. “Normally he doesn’t eat much.” If the dog wants food, he gets fed. This is the way it works in this house. Laszlo wanders in to recharge his iPad, a beautiful child, shirtless with long brown hair down to his trousers. He does not look at us, mumbles something at his mum. She smiles and lets him be. Everyone is doing their thing. “We’re home schooling,” she says. Home schooling as well! “Well, not really. The local authority rings you up and asks if you’ve done an hour of maths or English, but I reckon children learn from what’s around them.” Like she did. “every day is challenging being a parent to autistic children – the meltdowns, the sleep difficulties, the still-in-nappies, but there are positives like hyper-fixation, becoming an expert at what you love can only be a good thing” You can learn from counting trees, making pictures, reading stories? Exactly, says Kelly. Laszlo is obsessed with computer games right now. “He’s just Laszlo,” she says. “It’s kind of un-schooling.”

I baulk at this term, reminded of Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘uncoupling’, as if no one else had ever been divorced before, or had worked hard to keep the peace with their ex. “It has been hell at times,” Kelly admits. But more difficult by far, she says, is the official way of dealing with families that don’t fit in: the 100 million emails with social services and the queues to speak to a ‘key worker’, and the begging for sensory therapy that is promised but never happens.

Yet in this house without rigid lines, peace reigns. This is not chaos, this is living. Not only does Kelly make work in a kitchen crowded with animals and children, but she builds stuff, too: while her neighbours have resorted to plastic windows, she mended all the sash windows of her and Jamie’s Victorian house herself, leaning out at dangerous heights to sand, fill and paint. “They don’t all work perfectly,” she says, “but I’d never mended a sash window before!”

There are no rigid lines in Kelly’s work either. Her enormous, rounded, hand-made vessels are everything AI isn’t, everything school and uniforms and square desks and neat homework and ‘working hours’ aren’t. “I feel so lucky that I can make a living out of making something that people buy and encourage me to carry on with.” Kelly writes words on some of her clay vessels, scrawling in glaze. Dreams, warnings, maxims, simple words like ‘fuck’ and ‘off’ and then just what is happening that day, like ‘Nina [her next-door neighbour] brought me tea.’ Or, after a snuggle with Laszlo, ‘And then you brought me your pearls of wisdom’.

So that’s how Kelly Jessiman has made it. She has dared to be herself. Kelly’s ceramic art is an impression of Kelly Jessiman in the world. Apprehension dissolved, Kelly hugs me goodbye. She says of her work: “We’re all seeking connection and acceptance. I have found a way to be me.”

Kelly Jessiman’s latest body of work can be found at McCully & Crane in Rye. mccullyandcrane.com