Create with joy
Kerrie Illsley
BA Hons Applied Arts
Welcome
I'm a ceramic artist with a deep interest in childhood, kinship, and the quiet ways we carry memory.
My work explores how personal and inherited moments layer over time - how they stay with us, shift, and resurface. I reflect on ideas of nostalgia and preservation, capturing meaningful moments in ceramic form.
Studio practice
Sculptures are created from high-fire clay using traditional coiling and hand-building techniques, made thoughtfully one at a time. Every piece is original, signed, and numbered.
About the Artist
Kerrie Illsley is a ceramic artist whose work centres around beings known as Nummias - devoted vessels that sit somewhere between sculpture and companion.
Illsley’s practice draws on the instinctive human tendency to attribute presence and personality to the objects around us. Influenced by ideas found in animism - the belief that all things possess a form of spirit or consciousness - and shaped by the imaginative instincts of childhood, her work explores how ordinary objects can carry humour, presence, and subtle emotional resonance.
Working directly in clay without moulds or casting, Illsley allows each Nummia to emerge gradually through the making process. Faces appear almost instinctively within vessel-like forms, allowing individual expressions and quiet personalities to emerge that feel discovered rather than deliberately constructed.
Sculpted as singular ceramic forms and released in small batches, the Nummias balance playfulness with sensitivity. While they often appear humorous or gently mischievous, the sculptures resonate on a deeper level, inviting reflection on companionship, presence, and the quiet comfort of objects that share our living spaces.
As her practice has developed, Illsley’s work has also become shaped by an increasing awareness of time, memory, and mortality - the quiet understanding that the objects we live alongside often outlive us. Through these small sculptural beings she explores how objects can hold traces of humour, tenderness, and human experience.
Working from her studio in the UK, Illsley creates works that explore how even the smallest objects can carry surprising emotional presence within the quiet rituals of everyday life.
