Our teachers and guest potters
All of our sessions are taught by local teachers who have many years of experience in their practice. The studio embraces cross disciplinary ways of learning and will host guest lectures, artists, makers and potters. We welcome residential potters who wish to exchange ideas and practices from around the world. We would love to hear from you if you wish to be guest teacher or potter.
Kim Kish
Kim teaches wheel throwing and is the owner of St Leonards Ceramics Studio. She believes the studio as a place that provides excellent teaching, creativity, learning, sharing and carries on the tradition of her previous tutors who provided her the same experience. The studio is embedded into the community, nurturing art and an appreciation of ceramics and the making process.
After studying art and art history at Ohio University she began studying with a wheel throwing potter in Seattle and continued learning in a studio in London, with the late potter Roland Austin who specialized in tableware. She brings over 20 years of working for not-for- profit and commercial arts organizations, and a philosophy and practice gained from training as a tai chi teacher.
Working primarily with wheel thrown forms with a focus on functional objects and tableware, Kim’s work is influenced by her interest in archaeology, landscape, and Japanese and Greek ceramics. Simple yet well designed forms, that have beauty and function, she explores the relationship of experienced landscapes in her forms and designs using layers of slips and glazes, sometimes minimal and at other times raw and textured using found materials.
Lucy Cobb
Lucy studied Ceramics and Sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art and at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. She began her throwing training in Porcelain clay with Kinya Ishikawa in Val David, Canada.
She then completed an apprenticeship as a production potter at North Street Potters in London. Subsequently joining their production team, she was making tableware for London Michelin star restaurants and continuing to develop her functional and sculptural pots. In parallel she also began teaching at Clapham Pottery, a not-for-profit community pottery, teaching pottery to adults and children of all abilities.
She now lives and works from her studio in St Leonards-On-Sea where she continues to explore smoke firing, naked raku, paper clay, and to make natural glazes from indigenous plants and local clay.
Since relocating to the south coast she has been greatly inspired by the 140 Million year coastline; and she continues to acknowledge the key influence upon her work of the form and function of Korean Moon Jars from the 17th and 18th century.
Lucy teaches pottery at Eastbourne Studio Pottery, Heatherley School of Fine Art; and teaches Paper clay and other workshops at West Dean College of Art and Conservation.
Katia Giordanella
Katia teaches hand building and her recent inspirations are centred around nature. She began her career in the arts creating and performing in street theatre productions throughout Italy. Despite her love of theatre, she travelled to England and began her training in Ceramics at Southwark College in London. From then she graduated with a BA(Hons) in Art and Design at Hastings College.
Katia now dedicates her time to being a creative and independent artist, concentrating on sculpture along with hand building, often incorporating other mixed media. Throughout her career she has been featured in exhibitions in collaboration with artists in the UK and Europe, each year taking on new themes for each collection of works.
Jane Sarre
Jane is a curator turned ceramicist with a particular interest in the creative process. After an art foundation course almost entirely dedicated to ceramics at Nene College she studied at the Universities of Sussex and Leicester, and UCL and worked Kent County Council Museum team, the Museum of London and Hackney Museum.
Returning to her first love in 2012 she joined a shared studio in East London, attending numerous specialist short course to enhance her ceramics knowledge, studying with Deborah Boden, Jo Davies, Svend Bayer and many more. Initially focussing on thrown tableware she developed a collection of contemporary pieces with clean lines and articulated forms that were popular with food stylists and restauranteurs, including Michelin starred chefs.
After a move to the coast, she began to draw on new inspirations and a more creative working practice that led her to handbuilt architectural sculpture using slab and extrusion techniques to make pieces that are dynamic, open and informed by functional architecture to investigate the ways in which places are constantly reinvented.
Jane has taught beginners ceramics and more advanced creative ceramics in small groups from her studio for many years, as well as 1-1 private tuition in throwing, and appearing as course tutor at the Forest Row School of Ceramics on their 3 month intensive ceramics course.
Láura Paloma-Ibáñez
Láura is an artist who works and plays with clay and has an ability to juxtapose precise, finely made ceramics with more boldly playful illustrative pieces. Her petite home studio sees her throwing clay on her potter’s wheel, and other times witnesses slow, more tactile hand-built ceramics. Láura seeks to arose curiosity and embolden the beauty in functional everyday objects, illustrating the small, joyful and sometimes cheeky.
After completing her Illustration BA at Camberwell College of the Arts she taught wheel throwing to children in South London, followed by an interval of working as a gardener before moving down to the south coast where she has been living, making and working since 2017.
Studio Assistants
Lou, Karen, Chris, Jess and Luke, our studio assistants are essential for the day to day running of the studio. They keep the clay recycling, make glazes, clean, empty the clay trap and take endless trips up and down to the kilns to be loaded.