OBJECT-MATTER "O-M" is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary art and design practice founded by Carrie Lau in 2016.
Carrie Lau
Carrie Lau is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles.
Born and raised in Hong Kong, she has lived in Los Angeles since 2008. Her work exists between these two rhythms, the density and saturation of Hong Kong and the light and slowness of California. Within this in-between space, she explores how memory shifts, softens, and takes shape.
She founded O-M (Object-Matter) in 2016, with a background in art direction and illustration. That foundation shaped her sensitivity to composition, color, and spatial relationships, and over time her work moved away from the screen and into the physical.
Clay became a turning point. Through hand-building, she began to work more intuitively, responding to weight, imbalance, and imperfection. The material became a collaborator rather than a tool, and her design sensibility and artistic practice gradually merged into a quieter, more tactile language.
Her work spans ceramic sculpture, painting, and wall-based objects. Often organic and irregular, her forms feel like fragments of a memory, a gesture, or something not fully resolved. Each piece holds a sense of pause, as if caught mid-thought or mid-transformation.
Carrie draws from lived experience and fleeting moments such as shifting light, the rhythm of walking, and the emotional residue of a place. These are translated into form through color, texture, and repetition, including her use of dots, layering, and soft, unstable edges.
These quiet moments are not separate from the work. They are the inspiration.
O-M is her studio and evolving practice, a space where objects are not only made, but felt. Each piece is an invitation to slow down, to notice, and to hold small moments of joy, wonder, and stillness within everyday life.