Helena Lacy is a London-based ceramicist and creator of unnatural yet organic shapes. Lacy has been making in her singularly earthy style for nearly a decade, finding cause and inspiration in the movement of natural forms – stones, coral, fossils, lava, and nature-born female body.

Lacy is currently undertaking a Master’s in Ceramics at the Royal College of Art, building on her degree from the Wimbledon College of Art, her sculpting background, and her many residencies: at Shiro Oni Studio in Japan, working with an always-burning, ritual-making wood-fired Anagama kiln; at AARK in Finland; and at Zentrum Fur Keramik in Berlin.

Lacy’s ceramics play with and push the boundaries of their necessary dimensions, presenting as flat silhouettes and willing new forms to appear through the negative space between them. This creation within creation, the flow of shape from shape, is the guiding process in Lacy’s work.

Emblematic of her work is Lacy’s Fingo collection: fingō from the Latin meaning I create, mould, form, shape, imagine.Lacy’s fingō vases are curious to the eye, standing in defiant balance, having been created with a grounding centre to support the near-cascading shapes. The delicate tipping point of the vases’ weight, the intrinsic flow of movement in the outer lines of the ceramics, and the simultaneously delicate yet heavy and grounding fired-clay, all come together to mirror the sheer thrill and calm of standing in a wild, harmonious natural world.