Katy Stubbs

Katy Stubbs is a South-African British artist who lives and works in London. Stubbs studied illustration at the School of Visual Arts, New York and has completed residencies at Palazzo Monti, Italy, 2021 and ALMA ZEVI, Venice in 2019. She has had solo exhibitions at ALMA ZEVI London (2020) and Lyndsey Ingram, London (2023, to coincide with Frieze London). She has been accepted into the Anderson Ranch residency, Aspen, USA, which commences in February 2024. 

Stubbs predominantly works in ceramics, building each piece by hand. Each work is planned with multiple sketches, and whilst some follow the Greek ceramic tradition of urns and vessels, others are more akin to still life scenes with ceramic appendages attached. Beer bottle lids, posters, cigarettes and food pieces are often integrated into clay. Her work evokes a witty commentary on everyday life, societal problems and the fine line between comedy and tragedy. Aside from her ceramics practice, Stubbs creates paintings on metal which tap into her myriad of interests; including but not limited to magic and magicians, Americana and both natural and man-made disasters. The language of these is often taken from Stubbs’s training in illustration and from her love of comic books. 

Stubbs participated in the British Ceramics Biennial in 2021 as well as the Great Women Artists residency and exhibition, curated by Katy Hessel at Palazzo Monti (also 2021). She has participated in group exhibitions at T.J Boulting, Tristan Hoare and Timothy Taylor, New York. Her work is in the Zabludowicz Collection and the Katrin Bellinger Collection. Stubbs was included in the travelling institutional show ‘Welcome to My World: Ceramics with Narrative’ which toured the UK in 2020-2021 and also included a piece which was shown at the Women’s Art Collection at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, in the exhibition ‘Life is Still Life’ (2023). Her work has been exhibited in galleries in Stockholm, Berlin, New York, Washington and London and has featured in House & Garden (2023), T Magazine (2022), British Vogue (2021), My Art Guides (2020), W Magazine (2020), FAD Magazine (2020), gallerytalk.net (2020), It’s Nice That (2019), The Art Gorgeous (2019), Horst und Edeltraut (2017) and Artforum (2016).