Tessa Eastman

Born in 1984 London where the artist continues to live and work. Creativity and innovation sit at the heart of Eastman’s artistic practice and collectors are drawn to the originality, skill and the daring approach she brings to ceramic art. Building pieces by hand, she draws inspiration from organic form as seen through a microscope or in the skies. She explores the strangeness of growth of natural phenomena in which systems flow and digress from an intended pattern.

Eastman’s playful aesthetic lends itself to the abstract cloud-like formations or curious and ambiguous sea-like creatures that appear to inhabit her work. Whether one relates pieces to the astral or underwater world, her sculptures are metaphors for the multifaceted personalities of people, which are sometimes biting and sometimes sweet.

The artist foregoes what is pretty and classical in ceramic history, creating objects that are uncanny and bizarre. The idiosyncratic shape, the combination of solid and open forms, bulbous and interlaced, accretive and geometric, weighs with the attention she gives to their surfaces. Coarse and smooth, soft and glossy, pristine and weathered, textures are presented in heightened colours, following intensive research into glaze science.

Eastman’s studio is situated at Cockpit Arts, a community of London’s leading craftspeople. She graduated from the University of Westminster in 2006 with a BA Honours in Ceramics, and in 2015 gained a MA in Ceramics and Glass from one of the world’s most reputable design schools, The Royal College of Art.

Eastman was shortlisted for the Young Masters Maylis Grand Ceramics Prize in 2017 and won the Craft Emergency Award in 2016 which granted her a solo show at Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth in 2018. She has been exhibiting in the UK and abroad since 2005 and her work is shown regularly at International Art Fairs.

Her sculptures have been selected for Biennials including the British Ceramics Biennial at the old Spode Factory in Stoke-on-Trent in 2015 and she received an honourable mention at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale in Korea in 2017. Pieces have found a serious following among collectors and her work has been commissioned and presented by the financial firms Abacus in 2003, Gresham Private Equity in 2016 and Clifford Chance in 2019.