A celebration of friendship as working method, featuring five artist duos who collaborate in clay
Curated by Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley (Leisure), Ceramics Friends highlights community building, friendship and creative interrelation through clay. This edition, the fifth in a planned series of five biennales, presents the works of five artist duos who work in friendship, engaging with clay as a shared conceptual material. Expanding the notion of ceramics beyond produced objects, the curators focused on the communal aspects of ceramics work within a studio setting, and the care, resilience, and collaboration this generates.
The exhibition features ceramic sculpture and installation, and public programming events for all ages, including a foraged clay workshop for families, a workshop in collaboration with Rozynski Art Centre in the Eastern Townships, a round table with participating artists at Concordia University’s Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture and Technology, and much more. The McClure Gallery thanks the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts for their support of this project.
Meet the Artists
Emii Alrai (Leeds, UK) and Eve Tagny (Montreal) worked collaboratively for two years developing the concept, conversation and framework for Sutures (2022). Alrai is an artist and trained museum registrar whose practice subverts the traditional visual language of museum displays. Tagny’s multidisciplinary practice explores spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency in correlation with nature’s rhythms and materiality.
Meredith Carruthers (Montreal) and Susannah Wesley (Montreal) have worked together under the name ‘Leisure’ since 2004. Their research-based art project The Ceremony (2021) is inspired by a document entitled “The Ceremony,” found in the personal papers of local ceramicist Wanda Rozynska Staniszewka (1929-2007), which describes a series of objects, costumes, gestures and forms intended as “symbols for the renewal and healing of friends,” between herself, her husband Stanley Rozynski, and her friend Gail Lamarche. This project was developed as part of the Foreman Art Gallery’s ArtLab residency and further supported by the Rozynski Art Centre, the artist’s former home and studio.
Marie-Michelle Deschamps (Montreal) and Celia Perrin Sidarous (Montreal) began working together in 2020 when they shared a studio. Marie-Michelle Deschamps’ practice focuses on language as an inhabitable space where aesthetic forms reside. Celia Perrin Sidarous is an image-based artist indebted to sStill lLife, whose artworks present assemblages following an internal and associative logic. Both artists have featured in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in Canada and abroad.
Heather Goodchild (Toronto) and Margaux Smith (Toronto) have been collaborating informally for two years. Goodchild is a multidisciplinary artist exhibiting internationally and throughout Canada since 2001. Recurring themes in her work include symbolism, rituals, personal development, and the collapse of the hierarchy of artistic disciplines. Smith uses layers of paint, drawing, and collage to convey the body’s state of constant transformation. She is represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto.
August Klintberg (Calgary) and Benny Nemer's (Paris, FR) collaborative work articulates itself through participatory gestures involving acts of hospitality, floral gift giving, and paper wrapping, alongside artistic research into the œuvre and legacy of Montreal potter Rosalie Namer (1925-2006). Their projects have been presented in galleries, flower shops, and community gardens in Canada, the United States, Germany, and Scotland.
Associated workshops:
Meet the curators
Leisure is a conceptual collaborative art practice between Montreal-based artists Meredith Carruthers and Susannah Wesley. Working together under the name “Leisure” since 2004, their approach extends their own conversation and collaboration to include their historical subjects, family members, and community participants. The resulting projects are multidisciplinary in format—from workshops, to published texts, interactive installations, and object-making involving a variety of media.
Inspired by the foundation of the Visual Arts Centre as a local ceramic skill share–The Potters Club–started by Eileen Reid and her female friends in the 1940s and carried on by Virginia McClure as the VAC, this exhibition explores the premise that working-in-friendship is a pervasive and under-recognized method of artmaking.
Other projects by Leisure on friendship, collaboration, material exploration and intergenerational exchange include: Having Ideas by Handling Materials (Oakville Galleries, 2023), The Ceremony (Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop’s University, 2021), Conversation with magic forms (most recently exhibited at CAG Vancouver, 2020), How one becomes what one is (Musée d’art de Joliette, 2018), Panning for gold/Walking you through it (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2017) and Dualité/Dualité (Artexte, Montreal, 2015).
Wesley and Carruthers are currently working on a precedent-setting collaborative PhD candidacy in Research-Creation within Concordia University's Individualized Program.
About the Biennale
The Virginia McClure Ceramic Biennale is dedicated to the celebration of excellence and innovation in contemporary ceramic art. For each edition of the Biennale, an invited curator is given carte blanche to organize an exhibition of outstanding work by artists in the expanded field of ceramics. Previous editions were curated by Jean Pierre Larocque (Caméléon, 2014), Linda Swanson (Épisode, 2016), Luc Delavigne (573°, 2018), and Amelie Proulx (XYZ, 2021).
The Biennale honours the legacy of Virginia McClure, a ceramic artist and early member of the Potters’ Club, which evolved into the Visual Arts Centre. Each Biennale includes public programming events and an accompanying publication.
