A woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and green eyes smiling softly, wearing a navy top with a colourful, patterned dungarees, standing indoors with a blurred background.

Kayleigh Peters | Artist | West Sussex

Biography

Kayleigh Peters (b.1987) is a socially engaged artist working to encourage shifting perspectives surround women’s health and taboo subjects connected to womanhood. Through personal story-telling and facilitation of community practice, like with her current project The Gown Project. Peters’ graduated from the University of Brighton in 2021 with a First Class BA (hons) 3D Design and Craft. With a focus in materials and how they can be used to explore personal stories of difficult health, Peters’ has exhibited with the AMP Gallery, Thrown Contemporary, Luminoir Art Gallery, and Cluster Crafts. She was selected for the LSM Art Award, and is currently an Associate Artist with Devonshire Collective in Eastbourne. Peters’ has undertook several collaborative projects working with Cent.ldn, Charlotte Hodes, and Soul to Thread. She also supports other artists with technical support for ceramics projects.

More details can be found on her CV.

Artist Statement

Kayleigh Peters’ practice explores the entangled relationship between the body, material, and systems of care. Working with ceramics and textiles, she draws on feminist craft traditions to interrogate how women’s health has been treated medically, socially, and symbolically; across time. Her work is rooted in the lived experience of hidden illness and draws attention to the emotional, physical, and institutional complexities of navigating the healthcare system as a woman.

Through clay and stitch, Peters reclaims processes historically dismissed as feminine or domestic, transforming them into tools of resistance and reflection. The ceramic vessel becomes a metaphor for the body; fragile yet enduring, exposed yet containing. Her surfaces often bear raw, ruptured, or cracked glazes, echoing internalised pain and the silencing of symptoms. In her textile work, the act of embroidery slows time, allowing the personal and political to be stitched into form.

Peters’ practice is both research-led and emotionally charged, weaving together mythology, medical history, and lived experience to confront systemic gender biases. Her work challenges what society deems visible, valuable, or worthy of care, using materiality to elevate narratives that are often ignored or pathologised.

Through making, she creates spaces of visibility, memory, and protest. Each piece holds tension between softness and strength, control and surrender, concealment and exposure offering a feminist reimagining of the vessel not just as form, but as witness.

Process + Practice

A woman shaping a large, red clay vase on a rotating wheel in a pottery studio.
A woman with shoulder-length hair and glasses, sitting at a desk, writing in a notebook and looking at an open art book, in an art studio with art supplies and a mannequin in the background.
Woman shaping a large ceramic vase in a pottery studio.
A woman with shoulder-length hair and a smartwatch painting details on a clay sculpture in a studio. She is wearing a grayish-green long-sleeve shirt and red pants.
A black and white photo of a person's hand holding extruded clay.
Person shaping a ball of clay with hands in a pottery workshop.
A woman working with cyanotypes in a studio, submerged in a water tray.
A person shaping a pottery piece on a rotating pottery wheel with their hands covered in clay.
A woman working with a kiln in a pottery studio, holding a ceramic piece. 
Special thanks to Hayley Kim Hall Photography for images and video production.