The Spaces Between

Lou Power’s relationship with ceramics came full circle in 2023 when she finally responded to a decades-long calling. “I always dreamt about it,” she admits, “but I was scared to try because it was the thing I'd wanted to do for years. I worried it might be a disappointment.” With modest expectations, she purchased a twelve-pound bag of clay – her first since university – and started sculpting around the kitchen table. “I completely lost myself in it, and suddenly four hours had passed.”

Returning to a creative practice often requires patience to find a rhythm, but for Lou, the vision arrived almost fully formed. “It's strange, I feel like this style and aesthetic were with me when I was younger, but now that I’m older, I can see it more clearly. The seed was only just planted before I changed direction.” Lou completed a degree in ceramics from Cardiff University in the early nineties, but her studies focused on functional ceramics, whereas she had always felt drawn to abstract sculpture and shape.

Lou traces her interest in blocky, rough-hewn forms further back to an experience in school, when she happened upon a book in the library about the sculptor Arnold Zimmerman. “He made these big totems that some might deem ugly, but I loved them,” she recalls. Even then, her interest lay in creating bold, non-functional, hand-built ceramics – but letting go of her formal training would take time.

After graduating, unsure of her direction in ceramics, Lou spent several years in Manchester making porcelain lighting – an early study in light and shadow that echoes through her work today. She later opened a clothing boutique named Hub, eventually relocating the business to London. For more than twenty years, Lou ran Hub, all the while feeling a lingering pull toward ceramics. It wasn’t until she closed the store for good – coinciding with her daughter’s teenage years – that the timing felt right to welcome clay back into her life.

A year and a half since reconnecting with the craft, Lou Power makes ceramics full-time from a studio in her north London home. “It’s a creative space: my husband is in a band, and my daughter also makes music. But realistically, I spend the most time in there,” she laughs. Like a gardener tending plants, Lou watches over her pieces as they evolve from raw clay to finished forms.

This integrated lifestyle allows Lou to work reactively. “I love coming downstairs in the morning to check on my work, seeing if it’s ready for the next step,” she explains. “You have to make sure the clay is at the right level of hydration to start building with it.” Lou plans her pieces with stencil drawings, experimenting with the arrangement of shapes. “It is somewhat structured, but the process of sculpting the clay is very natural and intuitive. There is a kind of order to it, but also a looseness.”

Lou has created an installation for the window of the TOAST Oxford shop, an evolution of her signature stoneware wall pieces. The standing slabs evoke the moulded contours of museum walls and ceilings, resonating with the themes of our seasonal concept, The Curious Mind. Alongside the window installation, the shop will display a series of brick sculptures, positioned as bookends to reflect the literary narrative woven through our Autumn Winter 2025 collection.

“This project challenged me to design forms that could stand on their own, as opposed to hanging on a wall,” Lou says. “Each time I create, the process reveals something new and continually leads me forward.” The finished piece is composed of angled slabs with textured surfaces, drawing the eye to negative spaces and the dance of light and shadow. “I’m constantly inspired by architecture: the spaces between buildings, the silhouettes they cast against the sky,” Lou explains. “I think it resonates with the space within me as well – giving myself the space to create.”

Lou chooses not to work with colour, feeling that it distracts from what she wants people to see: the shapes and textures of her ceramics. Viewed in person, the pieces showcase Lou’s respect for the natural characteristics of the clay; working with different clay bodies, she allows the grit and coarseness to shape the personality of a piece. When applying glaze, she sometimes leaves sections of the clay body showing through to honour the raw material.

Clay has been a quiet constant for Lou, even in the years when life built a wall between them. Its hold endured, and when the time was right, it greeted her like an old friend. “That twelve-pound bag of clay was the beginning of a complete and utter change of career, but I don't see it that way,” she reflects. “I see it as returning to something that was lying dormant in me for a long time.”

Visit the TOAST Oxford shop until Sunday 31 August to view Lou Power’s ceramic window installation.

Lou wears the TOAST Gathered Cotton Chambray Shirt, Cotton Canvas Workwear Jacket and Panelled Cotton Linen Poplin Skirt.

Words by Bébhinn Campbell.

Photography by Marco Kesseler.