holding shape

I was given the vase as a housewarming gift. A slate blue ceramic piece with women at the market carved across its surface — elegant, everyday, enduring. My aunt and uncle have collected Lloyd Morris’s work for years, and I had always admired it in their home. Not long after, they took me to visit his studio.

Lloyd Studio Ceramics sits quietly in Tower Isle, Jamaica, where it’s been for over fifty years. Lloyd and his wife have run it together all this time. They’ve trained artists, raised children, welcomed visitors. The space is light-filled and calm. Vessels line the shelves — matte black urns, wide bowls with scalloped edges, small pots glazed in cocoa brown and glossy red. He shows me each shelf with the steady ease of someone who has done this before, many times, but still enjoys it.

I took a photo of him standing in front of his work. Hands crossed, smiling. A life lived in full color — expressed through clay and carried home in someone else’s hands.

When we talk about art, we often elevate the ones who made it into galleries — the known names, the international sales. But there’s something about artists like Lloyd that holds deeper meaning for me. The ones whose work doesn’t chase trends, but instead becomes part of the texture of people’s families and lives. Their legacy isn’t always institutional. It’s intimate. These are the pieces that sit in our homes. That we pass down. That we wrap in newspaper when we move.

There is beauty in that kind of commitment, to your craft, to your community, to staying rooted. What it means to keep showing up to the work, day after day, without fanfare. To shape something with care and let it speak for itself. In homes across the Caribbean and beyond - on mantels in Kingston, in kitchens in Flatbush, on bookshelves in Wolverhampton. As beauty. As history. As legacy.

-L