About
I find it slightly embarrassing to call myself an artist.
What I actually am is a tradesman who is genuinely, perhaps embarrassingly, creative. Forty years of professional craft — traditional signwriting, commercial paint-spraying, sculpture, metalwork, woodwork — and I still think of myself as someone who works with his hands rather than someone who makes Art with a capital A. My geography teacher once wrote VERBAL DIARRHOEA across my homework in large red capitals. I’ve always considered it a compliment.
My mother Betty was a graduate of Nottingham School of Art. Tiny in stature. Meticulous. She designed wallpaper for John Lewis. Beautiful, precise, detailed work — the kind that requires patience and a very fine brush.
I went the other way.
I work big. The bolder the better. I’m not interested in tiny details or mass production or anything that could be described as run-of-the-mill. Every piece I make is one of a kind, built once, built properly, and finished to a standard I’m prepared to put my name to.
Motorbikes
My connection to motorbikes goes back further than me.
In May 1914, a man named Leigh Bentall Kelsey — my great uncle and my namesake — was hauled before Lambeth Police Court and fined 40 shillings for driving a motorcycle at excessive speed through Brixton. Not long after, he was commissioned as an officer in the Coldstream Guards and saw action at the Somme. He was also, from the one painting of his I ever saw hanging in my grandmother’s house, a seriously talented artist. I only discovered recently that he didn’t die until 1980. I had no idea he was still alive. I wish I’d known.
I started working at Fox’s Kawasaki Centre on Mapperley Plains, Nottingham at fourteen — cleaning bikes, assembling them from crates, touching up rust with paint. One morning my foreman Dave Turner handed me the keys to a Z1000 and told me to take it down the road and bring it back in one piece. I was two months off fifteen. I didn’t turn down the offer. I probably did 70 or 80mph down Woodborough Road. I brought it back in one piece.
I ride a 1980 Kawasaki Z1000 — a US import — and a 2019 Suzuki Katana. The bikes inform the work. The work informs the bikes. It’s the same instinct: raw, mechanical, built to last, no shortcuts.
Place
I spent sixty-two years in Nottingham before relocating to north Lincolnshire — drawn here initially by love, and then surprised to discover the area had been waiting for me all along. My three-times great-grandmother was born in Market Rasen. It appears to have been a prosperous family. The Kelseys have a habit of ending up exactly where they’re supposed to be, usually at speed and slightly against the odds.
Everything you see on this site passes through my hands — from first sketch to final detail. There’s no team, no factory, no shortcuts. Pieces are made from new materials or from objects that have already lived a previous life, depending entirely on what the work demands.
All of it is made by hand, in Britain, built to outlast the people who buy it.
Some pieces behave themselves. Others require persuasion.
Based north of Lincoln. Working across Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and beyond.