CULTURE ONLINE
Lois Samuels: When Portals Open
Artist Lois Samuels transports us into a world of her own making.
WINTER 2025
WORDS Gemmarosa Ryan
PHOTOGRAPHY Brigitte Sire
A lump of clay on the kitchen table. The light of an early Los Angeles morning. Artist Lois Samuels decides to forgo the drive to her studio and work from the comfort of her kitchen. She wants to get to work as soon as she’s woken up. She’ll glide into her day with her characteristic regal serenity, an effortless radiance of spirit, and draw inspiration from her drawers: a spatula, a skewer, and a spoon will shape her clay today.
Another night, inspiration strikes in the late hours. Lois returns to her kitchen but bypasses the light switch. She’s in the mood to create in dark-laden stillness, guided by the feeling of the wet earth in her palms, the divots and rivulets running along the vessels, details she will only notice fresh-eyed the day after. She looks forward to the surprise, seeing the mystical motion that moved her, returning to the earthen vessel as a continuation of the meditative act she started at its conception.
Lois’ practice is as much a reflection of herself as it is the world at large. Brimming with life, possibility, and chance encounter, receptive and responsive to the tides of the ocean and the tides of history. Fitting then, that the latest of her works, made between the darkness and light of her kitchen table, is called “OPEN.” In the place you sit, eat, receive, and be vulnerable, “you must come open,” Lois tells me. A warm invitation.
Openness seems to be Samuel’s approach to life at large. Scouted in her home country of Jamaica before turning twenty, she traversed the globe from runway to runway, Givenchy to Mugler to Miyaki, gracing the covers of German Vogue and American Essence, shot by world-renowned photographers such as Peter Lindbergh. Lois reflects, “I think the fashion industry has this facade of being so superficial and, yes, it can be phony, but there's so much creation in it.” Traveling the world and meeting so many talented individuals daily showed Samuels how life and creativity can and should go hand in hand. For Lois, the things we wear and live beside are sources of vitality "woven into the tapestry" of our lives.
And just like a tapestry, the end of a thread is never clear, and neither is the beginning. Lois didn’t transition out of fashion to devote herself to ceramics. On the contrary, the two continue to flow into each other. Samuels moves between mediums the way she once moved between continents—effortlessly, with an eye for elegance and a deep respect for tradition. Samuels, recently signed by ONE Management, will return to the runways soon, ushering in prospective transformations to her current ceramic practice.
The deliberate movement Samuels hones on the runway now finds expression in her ceramics, her hands moving with the learned instinct that guides her walk. Lois has always been drawn to “the magic of earth and how life comes out of it.” Her practice is a conduit for that laden spirit of natural materials. While some pieces take days, smaller works take hours. Samuels constructs all her sculptures by hand, without the use of a wheel, giving life to brown clay with the heat of her palms. It's a spontaneous process, the gentle whispers of a shape and contours of a curve call her, but the final product is a mystery only revealed by time. Lois is poised to relinquish her control and let the intimate relation between her hand and the clay tell her where to go. “When I'm making a ceramic piece,” Lois says with reverence, “it's almost like birthing.”
SCULPTURE Sankofa Series
While the creation of individual pieces is intuitive, Samuels abides by structure when grouping them. Having forged creative relationships with many fashion designers, and even designing a clothing line herself, Samuels thinks of her ceramics in series. She’s made several now: “Sankofa,” a word from the Ghanaian Twi language that means “to go back and get it,” a way to reconnect with past ancestors and their unmediated relationship to nature, “Fragmented Beauty,” a collection of works that approaches the mosaic of identity, reflecting us, our fragmented yet melodically beautiful existence, “OPEN” the series that began on Lois’ kitchen table, a material exploration of what it means to be nurtured, open to receiving, and “Portal” a tribute to divine bliss, Mother Earth, the joy of motherhood and womanhood at large.
“I see myself as a part of a rich and evolving tradition of ceramicists,” Samuels says with a radiant smile. Aside from the thrum of ancestral binds, Lois draws inspiration from other contemporaries like Zizipho Poswa, who uses large ceramic and bronze sculptures as an invocation of womanhood and the matrilineal society of the Xhosa people, Simone Leigh, another black female black female artist who represented the United States at the 2022 Venice Biennale, and Jamaican intuitive artists such as Kapo and Gerald Brown.
SCULPTURE Portal Series
SCULPTURE Portal Series
There’s musical influence too. While Samuels works, music will accompany her in process, Reggae will always be a preference, Bob Marley and Burning Spear, but she also loves jazz, classical and Italian film scores. Early in her life, Lois thought she would be a musician, and that genetic predisposition came into fruition with her son, a musician and artist himself. It's clear that he is Lois’ greatest source of inspiration by the way her face lights up at his mention.
What are her pieces meant to hold? They hold as much as Lois herself, open and accepting of whatever the environment offers them, whether it be a plant or a pen. But they are never empty. When her ceramics aren’t busy actively holding another object, they are full of other magnitudes: historical lineages, the echoes of tradition, or a pregnant stillness. “Stillness actually speaks. There’s a voice in it,” Lois tells me, pausing to amplify the effect.
Looking ahead, Samuels is preparing for a spring show at Twentieth Gallery in Los Angeles this March, a milestone she’s eagerly anticipating. “I'm hoping that before the end of the year, I'll have representation in the UK and other areas around the world.” Her aspirations are clear—not just to exhibit, but to expand her reach while ensuring the catharsis of creation. “I love it so much,” she says, her voice filled with undiluted wonder. “I want it to grow, and I want to be successful at it... to keep making and enjoying the process for the rest of my life.”
The vessels she makes reflect the worldview she holds. Equally still as they are moving, material as they are spiritual, and solid as they are fluid. Samuels manages to meld the discordances of lived experience into a profound cohesion. The vessels feel like soulful, sentient things, opening portals to other worlds. And with a maker as hopefully composed as Lois, no doubt those other worlds will be utopic. If we etch, carve, and fire a soul into the material around us, Lois’ work suggests that the objects themselves can breathe life back into us too. ❤
STORY CREDITS
PHOTOGRAPHY Brigitte Sire, WORDS Gemmarosa Ryan, EDITING Sofia Bagdade
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