Adventures in LaLaLand

Kirei Samuel in LaLaLand, her studio, north of Bloomfield

The molten world of Kirei Samuel

It is chilly this morning in LaLaLand waiting for the bus to arrive. Artist Kirei Samuel, insulated in a long woollen coat, is keeping busy in her implement shed-turned studio, preparing for a visit by some 65 members of the William Morris Society of Canada. They are late.

The William Morris Society is a group dedicated to the life and ideas of the 19th century English artist, designer, writer and craftsman. Best known for his wallpaper and textile design, Morris’s followers are more interested in his ideas and how they formed his consideration of art and design.

Kirei Samuel’s studio is situated on high flat land on Scoharie Road, just west of Highway 62. She can see at least two wineries and many acres of farmland from her patch of the County. She works mostly in glass—conjuring colours and shapes from the molten material. The results range from easily accessible to strange and obtuse.

Like the glass she works with Samuel is always in motion, always searching and seemingly never content. When she feels she has mastered something—a technique or method—she is inclined to smash it and start again.

Samuel inspects the coloured patterns revealed by smashing previously fused glass.

To illustrate the point, Samuel retrieves a slab of glass—about a foot square—and attacks it with a hammer. Holding up a shard of the shattered glass, she points to the pattern of rainbow colours the outbreak of violence has revealed.

“That is what I am looking for,” says Samuel. “My world is driven by the question, ‘What if?’”

Her studio features three furnaces— two small ones are suspended from the ceiling. She uses gravity to coax the molten glass to drip like taffy out the bottom of the suspended kilns, forming thin rods. These multicoloured glass rods then become the raw material for an array of designs and finished products.

There is an intense amount of work, time and craft infused into each piece she makes—not to mention the investment needed to acquire and operate her furnaces and studio.

“Glass is a hard sell,” says Samuel. “It is a very expensive medium. I sometimes wish I was driven to make art with a paintbrush.”

“I never really thought of myself as an artist,” says Samuel. “But that has changed as I have gotten older. I don’t consider myself an artist by what I create but rather the way I think.”

She expects monetary success would come easier if she made her most popular pieces over and over again. But Samuel isn’t wired that way—compelled to take a hammer to the familiar, the comfortable and the prosaic.

“I’m always searching,” says Samuel.

The bus pulls up outside the studio door. The group is visiting a sampling of studios and wineries on their two-day sojourn to the County. Most are from Toronto. They soon fill Samuel’s studio. She graciously answers their questions and makes a few sales, some of which require struggling with the credit card machine. The bus rumbles to life and the William Morris Society group move obligingly toward the vehicle. Several pause to consider the horizon stretching many kilometres north and south.

It has been a good morning. But Samuel is already moving on. She has recently taken courses on casting—creating moulds for the molten glass— to create new shapes and forms. She has acquired a casting furnace.

She is beginning to move away from creating art for the sake of beauty toward a more political aesthetic. She has ideas about the walls we build between us and the way they can degrade humanity.

These ideas require expression. Samuel reaches for the hammer.