Tessa Eastman

Tessa Eastman is an award-winning British ceramic artist with over twenty years' experience of working with clay. Her meticulously hand-built sculptures appear curiously alive with movement. While creating she looks for differences such as soft and hard, order and chaos, geometry and irregularity. Tessa says: "I aim to fix ungraspable states such as fleeting cloud formations, which represent the ideal and the perishable, doom and fantasy". She draws inspiration from natural phenomena as seen through a microscope, exploring the strangeness of growth where systems flow and digress.


Grouping work creates a dialogue of congruence and conflict where voluminous cloud-like shapes exploring the theme of space pushing outwards are juxtaposed with mesh structures revealing the internal. The tension between internal and external relates to receptacles where positive and negative space are equally valued, and also to the body where the void permits life. It is through sensitivity to form and glaze that Tessa's sculptures become animated and much time is invested in research and testing. Tessa says: "Colour is inspiring and creates a distinction between the sum of parts. Matt and shiny, coarse and smooth and hot and cool coloured glazes offer depth of character".


Tessa's dynamic sculpture sits at the vanguard of the contemporary ceramic art scene and she has been able to impress many with her originality, skill and a daring approach to the art form. Her complex Cloud Bundles and Crystal Formations have found a serious following among art collectors, gallerists and ceramophiles alike. Tessa's work has been presented by the financial firms Abacus in 2003, Gresham Private Equity in 2006 and Clifford Chance in 2019.