221. Mercedes Lucy - Clowning Around

2026
Ceramic Earthenware plate
13 cm

Mercedes Lucy is an artist whose practice centres on storytelling, often giving form to voices and experiences that remain unheard. Working primarily with clay, she draws directly onto surfaces using spontaneous, mythic, and feminine marks that celebrate the messiness and magic of lived experience. Hand-built plates, bowls, tiles, and sculptural vessels frequently incorporate casts taken from her own body, her children’s bodies, fruit, and animal forms, blending the sacred with the domestic and the everyday.

Her work is tactile and emotionally charged, characterised by sagging forms, pooling glazes, and deliberately imperfect surfaces that speak to care, rupture, labour, and repair. Alongside ceramics, her practice expands into immersive environments, including hanging macramé sculptures, embroidered textiles, and sound installations.

At the centre of the work are recurring themes of the body, the home, and the passing of time — spaces where softness, fury, tenderness, and vulnerability coexist. Through the use of traditional materials in contemporary and sometimes subversive ways, Lucy questions ideas of value, permanence, and the often invisible labour tied to domestic life.

She lives and works in Margate and is a permanent studio holder at TKE Studios, founded by Tracey Emin.