Kaytea Budd-Brophy

With a background in Textile Design and over 20 years of experience lecturing in Textiles and Fashion across Further and Higher Education, I bring a deep appreciation for creative expression and storytelling through my practice. I am also a trained person-centred counsellor, and my work is rooted in exploring the many facets of the human condition.

My creative practice and teaching are inspired by the richness of life’s journey — the moments of celebration, the inevitable disappointments, the scars we carry, both physical and emotional, and the resilience we build in response. I seek to honour the beauty in the breaks, the imperfections, and the experiences that shape our identities.

Mental health and disruptive thinking are central themes in my work. I am particularly interested in how fleeting thoughts can evolve into powerful forces that influence mindset and behaviour. Through this lens, I explore how even the smallest internal shifts can profoundly impact our everyday lives.

Humour plays an important role — not to mask the difficult parts, but to bring lightness, connection, and a sense of shared humanity.

My ceramics are about finding beauty in the breaks. I work with clay to explore cracks, scars, and turning points — the fragile and the resilient sitting side by side. Each piece is a reflection of lived experience: textured, layered, and imperfect in ways that feel true to the human story.

I recently graduated from the City Lit Diploma in Ceramics, where I immersed myself in throwing, hand-building, surface decoration, and other experimental processes. My practice often combines painterly mark-making with sculptural form, drawing on my background in Textile Design and over 20 years of teaching in Textiles and Fashion. This cross-disciplinary approach brings colour, pattern, and a sensitivity to surface into my clay work.

I am especially drawn to forms that carry a sense of history — vessels that suggest repair, objects that feel worn yet treasured, surfaces that reveal traces of time. In this way, I treat clay as both material and metaphor: strong yet fragile, permanent yet changeable.

Themes of mental health, humour, and disruptive thinking are central to what I make. The work asks questions about how we cope, connect, and rebuild, while humour offers lightness and humanity alongside the harder truths.

Each piece is, in its own way, a companion to life’s journey — tactile, imperfect, and alive with story.