Lily Shepherd is a multidisciplinary Naarm / Melbourne based artist working primarily in clay. She makes both sculptural and functional ware, using handbuilding techniques and occasionally the wheel. Lily builds each vessel intuitively, allowing the clay to lead her. Her practice moves between objects made to be used, and objects made to be looked at, treating the line between the two as porous rather than fixed.

Her work begins with lived experience, reflecting on aspects of her identity such as her relationship to food, growing up in a rural community, and being queer. These personal themes open into broader social and political questions, including feminism and queer history, and how bodies, appetites and identities have been regulated, represented and remembered. The vessel, a form built around containing, holding and serving, becomes a way to approach these subjects at close range.

Lily draws on a wide field of source material: archival imagery, historical vessels, animals and contemporary media. Rather than working from a single reference, she often weaves several together within one piece, allowing different eras and meanings to sit alongside each other. She builds these layers through a range of technical devices, including decals, varied surface techniques and glazing. Humour can be found throughout her work and is a way of making difficult subjects approachable, and of letting seriousness and play coexist in the same object.

Alongside ceramics, her practice extends into textiles, photography, and writing. These materials are not separate from the clay work but part of the same ongoing inquiry, each offering a different path into the ideas she returns to.