Interview · July 2026
Meet Katy Stubbs
This summer, Salemi Ceramics welcomed Katy Stubbs, whose residency is now coming to an end. Even though she is trained as an illustrator, Stubbs has worked with ceramics for almost ten years. She’s been using clay to tell stories, often with a playful look and a sharp sense of humour.
Katy enjoys the two sides of ceramics: the complex process of building a piece, and the pleasure of painting and glazing it afterwards. Her turning point as a ceramicist came when she understood how much freedom the medium gives.
“I realised I could put whatever I wanted on ceramics and that there aren’t any rules apart from physics. I thought my work had to be sad and serious to be good. But then I saw other people whose work I loved that weren’t sad or serious.”
She likes all things funny, cheeky, spooky, absurd, or gleefully macabre, as long as they can be laughed about. And whatever she loves ends up in her work. She is a keen collector, and her interests have taken her to a magicians’ convention and given her a large collection of books on budgies.
“All the things I like most, I usually try to find a way to bring into my work. Being an artist is a great way to be allowed to collect things or go to shows of your interests and claim the tax back,” she explains.
Humour and tragedy
Katy’s work stands out for the contradiction between its naive aesthetics and its barbed humour.
“I love to poke fun at things. Especially people.”
In her Disaster Series: Car Crashes and Death Chronicles, the tension is particularly obvious. Once taken out of context, accidents become hilarious, or insignificant events take on a tragic dimension.
“I am really interested in tragedy and how the closer you get to something, the greater the tragedy. The death of an ant can be tragic, or the crushing of a weed, if you are close enough. It’s something I would like to carry on exploring as I feel like it is something that might take a lot of work to explore more fully.”
Notable works
Stubbs finds much of her inspiration in comics and illustrators. But clay gives her something that drawing cannot.
“When you work in 3D there are more sides to tell a story. You can have something on the back of a pot that is a surprise from the other side. It is very freeing.”
She also collects found books, leaflets and other printed materials, which she pins to her studio wall until they find their way into a piece. Many of her works include drawings of these leaflets, postcards, notes or pictures: a reflection of her collected images, which in turn capture her inner world.
Katy says of one of her vases: “It contained a lot of things I had collected, and I enjoyed being able to put so much of myself into it.”
Her penchant for cheeky, detailed illustration often leads her to take on technical challenges, such as using clay to replicate a sheet of paper or a swarm of tiny flies. One of her most detailed pieces is a porcelain dish with an open lattice pattern, filled with a tower of cherries. Each cherry is built hollow, has its own stalk, and small insects sit between them.
“It took ages to glaze. I never thought about how many sides of a cherry there are.”
The Salemi residency
In Salemi, Stubbs has focused on two goals: making bigger work, and working more freely. The residency has given her the chance to build larger pieces than her small kiln at home allows.
“This usually means more things break,” she says, “but we will see.”
Working more freely has also meant following her inspiration wherever it leads. During the residency she has made a ceramic plank of wood, a pair of ceramic boots, and a series of ceramic magazines about bodybuilders, and she has painted a fish tank. To finish her stay, she is planning to glaze one large pot with illustrations of herself as a man.
“My inspiration has been a bit all over the place,” she confesses with a cheeky smile.