Sam Kelly

I'm a self-taught artist, living in East London, and mostly working with wearable art, jewellery, & small-scale transitory pieces.

I was born in a snowstorm on Easter Saturday, in the year of the Silver Jubilee, and brought up in the fields and woods of Essex before moving out to the mountainous heart of Snowdonia. I was always a bookish child, and one obsessed from an early age with stationery & art materials - I used to spend hours practising calligraphy and doodling monsters, though I had no patience for drawing landscapes or still lifes. I'm sure I was as much the despair of my art teacher as the class was mine.

I wrote, and still do sometimes (though I never mastered the englyn), and spent my formative years on farmyard work, on mountain walks, and in every single library and bookshop within twenty miles. Theatre work is in my family's blood, and I picked up stagecraft & lighting design from my father.

A few weeks ago, a man from MORI asked if I had any qualifications relevant to my current occupation, and the answer surprised both of us - I had to explain why a Master's degree in chemistry worked for art. I think I said something about materials science, the parallel development of technology and ways of looking at the world, historical changes and the reactions to them, and - oh, just go read Blake. He talks far better about the opposing tensions and the ways of looking at things on multiple levels at once than I ever could.

The Eithin logo is copyright 2007 Sam Kelly, all rights reserved.

The rest of this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License, unless I say otherwise. If you want to share, re-use, or distribute any of it, add a link back here and 'Copyright Sam Kelly' and I'll be happy.