Sculptor Sarah Maloney’s idea of a pleasure ground is a little more literal. It’s the title of her most recent solo exhibition, on display at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, until October 12, 2025. Pleasure Ground investigates both the body and sexuality (pleasure) as well as plants and other elements of the natural world (ground).

This exhibition has been seven years in the making. Maloney first started looking for interested collaborators back in 2018 and connected with Art Windsor-Essex, a gallery in Windsor, Ontario, and Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery in Halifax. The two organizations took on a curatorial role, and with support from Canadian Heritage’s Museum Assistance program, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery also came on board as a venue. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the world, and everything stopped. 

Leadership at the galleries changed hands, but they were still excited about the potential of getting Maloney’s work into their spaces, so in October of 2023, Pleasure Ground finally opened. 

Pleasure Ground is not a retrospective but does include pieces from all stages of Maloney’s career. The earliest piece is from 1993, when she was pregnant with her first child, and the most recent is a group of three pieces from 2021. The works in the exhibition are all vastly different from each other in size, shape, and medium and yet surprisingly cohesive in theme.

Throughout Pleasure Ground, Maloney challenges colonialism and the sneaky ways it has crept into every corner of our lives. The titular sculpture, completed in 2019, consists of a group of roughly four- to six-inch-tall, bronze Northern pitcher plants, carnivorous plants often found in bogs in Maloney’s native Nova Scotia. The plants, divorced from their natural habitat and placed in a gallery, become less recognizable as flora, calling to mind instead something vaguely suggestive of genitalia. 

The extraction of native plants and their placement in an institution are ideas Maloney toys with in other works as well. She challenges the colonial practice of collecting exotic plants through embroidery in her series of three titled Collect-Arrange (2021). These large-scale pieces are of embroidered vases, all from the British Museum collection, filled with flowers based on historical botanical illustrations. In the frame, Maloney has sculpted native Nova Scotia flowers in plaster. This both explores the exploitation due to colonialism and challenges the notion of “women’s work.” 

In her artist statement, Maloney writes, “needlework historically was a way for wealthy women to pass the time, they too were part of a collection kept at home while men went off to explore. I am drawn to embroidery because its history, process, and materiality speak to both traditional and contemporary ideas of women’s work.”

It is very difficult to choose which works to highlight, as they are all incredibly intricate and vibrant, humming with symbolism and patriarchal dissent. I could highlight Vertebrae, Sacrum, Coccyx (1998–1999), a collection of knitted organs that were created during Maloney’s second pregnancy, or Skin (2003–2012), a life-sized, beaded skin-suit that took nine years to complete. Then there’s her Reflection series (2010), which combines found furniture with bronze sculptures of orchids, their sexuality hidden behind a mirror image, and the most visually striking piece in the exhibition, Water Level (2012–2016), which reinterprets a pond landscape through a feminist lens by casting water lilies and lily pads in bronze and raising them up to eye level so you can walk through, raising questions of who is placed in view and why. 

One of the interesting things about a touring exhibition is seeing how the different gallery spaces interplay with the work. At the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Pleasure Ground is divided into two separate spaces. One is upstairs, with incredibly high ceilings, bright lights, and white gallery walls. The other, downstairs, is darker, with dark green walls and focused lighting. The exhibition spaces lend themselves to very different themes; the pieces in the basement room, whether intentionally or not, have more of a sexual overtone, highlighting the feminist elements of her work.

This decision, however, might lead viewers to miss some of Maloney’s work. The two rooms are separated by a staircase and a hallway, but there is no signage indicating that each space is just one part of a larger exhibition, or where to find the other half. This is more of an institutional critique than a curatorial one, but I could have easily left having only seen half of the show if I hadn’t decided to keep browsing the gallery.

Even if you accidentally only see half of Pleasure Ground (which you shouldn’t, now that you know it’s in two spaces), it would still be an intellectual and visual feast for your eyes. Pleasure Ground was exhibited at Art Windsor-Essex, then Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, and is at the Beaverbrook until October 12, 2025, when it will then head to the Confederation Centre in Charlottetown. 

Jericho Knopp is a writer and arts administrator based in Menahqesk (Saint John), New Brunswick, whose work explores narratives surrounding beauty, nostalgia, and mental illness. Her practice is primarily non-fiction based, but she also dabbles in poetry and prose. Her journalism has appeared in the CBC, CreatedHere, Visual Arts News, the Telegraph-Journal, and the Georgia Straight. Her narrative non-fiction has received support from artsnb and THIRD SHIFT festival, and her fiction has appeared in the FLOURISH Festival zine, and It’s Burning Off. She currently works as the programming director for ArtsLink NB.

While the wild green of a sunny May afternoon blazed outside, the bright white interior of a barn on a rural New Brunswick property radiated with its own kind of energy. These synergies are from a joint exhibition, Behind Moving Eyelids (May 10–11, 2025) in Rowley, New Brunswick, by Jeneca Klausen and Caitlin Lapeña, whose deceptively simple works hummed with ideas about feminine power, both surface and projected, and those of a deeper, darker, more private nature. 

I had to check Google Maps to locate the address for 13 Cedars, a new project space in rural Rowley, halfway between Saint John and St. Martins on Route 111. It was the second and final day of Behind Moving Eyelids, which featured wearable and sculptural works by Klausen, a Saint John jeweller with a dedicated following for her asymmetrical, nature-inspired, one-of-a-kind pieces. 

Her co-exhibitor, Lapeña, an artist working in printmaking and drawing, moved to the area a few years ago and co-founded 13 Cedars with her partner, Jay Isaac, a contemporary artist. She marvelled at how nearly everyone who came wore Klausen’s work, including me. On my left hand, I wear the bespoke silver wedding ring set on which she conspired with my husband. In my ears, I have a pair of wonky silver hearts I received as a birthday gift and have not removed in weeks.  

While local galleries have represented Klausen for decades, it was her first time exhibiting in a non-commercial setting. This gave the artist control over the installation and the opportunity to display her work on the wall in interesting shapes and configurations, including an installation of silver chains hung with pendants of handmade silver letters. 

Behind Moving Eyelids was also the first time Klausen showed alongside another artist. The pairing with Lapeña, who exhibited paintings, collages, drawings, and four fantastic silkscreens (she made them over the winter at Moncton’s Imago print studio), proved captivating. Their work resonated with intended connections from studio visits and an ongoing artistic dialogue, but also with serendipity, in symbols and motifs (cameos, cats, pearls) they arrived at independently. 

At a glance, there’s a risk of the show being taken merely as pretty or girly, which would be a huge miss. There’s a lot to unpack. 

The exhibition title Behind Moving Eyelids is from the late Saint John writer Gail Bonsall Kaye’s sole published poetry collection. Klausen had picked up a second-hand copy at an antiques shop and sent it to Isaac and Lapeña, who were at the time living in Toronto. Lapeña, like Klausen, was drawn to the old book as an object, with its beautifully illustrated cover. The poetic connections came later.

The artists’ shared interest in vintage objects informs their work. Lapeña repurposes images from antique women’s magazines, online archives, and found and personal items in her prints, paintings, and collages. For Behind Moving Eyelids, Klausen used sterling silver remnants from her studio, incorporating antique cameos, reclaimed coral, found beach stones, and vintage carved mother of pearl. 

This recycling speaks to the thrift of a time before fast fashion and disposable material culture, when nothing was wasted and the work of women consisted largely of making something from scraps: a quilt, a soup. There’s a strong sense of agency in the artists’ intentional reclamation of materials, images, and text. It reads as empowerment. 

Kaye’s 1973 poem “noon dream” is included in the exhibition notes. Some lines ring literally, such as the “heavy fronds of dark green ferns” in Klausen’s abstracted, organic forms and the Fundy landscape that is her first muse. Others are more of a vibe: the poem’s protagonist, dreaming in her green grotto, as in a fairy tale or myth, speaks of an ancientness Klausen’s work conveys. It is a temporal counterpoint to Lapeña’s more recent images from the capitalist age of advertising that commodifies beauty, fashion, and womanhood itself.

Jungian psychology is an influence in the deep blacks of Lapeña’s pristine prints. Oh, that midnight ink! You can disappear into it—and project onto it. The layering of the meticulous silkscreen process can be read as metaphorical, too, getting below the surface of things, abstracting, mystifying. Along with wearable art jewellery, Klausen presented several sculptural silver “spoonlets,” their cups the size of peas, perfect for a personal altar or as part of a private little rite.

Klausen says her Danish relatives often gift spoons for milestones such as birthdays or baptisms. And she explains that the expression “being born with a silver spoon in your mouth” originated during the bubonic plague, when the precious metal was believed to ward off the illness, projecting not only prosperity, but protection. With that, the work’s talismanic properties came into focus. Lapeña also depicts spoons in her work.

Some shows leave you gobsmacked at the gallery, then leave you. Others are a slower, sustained burn. Behind Moving Eyelids is the latter. The percolations began on the drive home, along the remote spruce-lined road. Weeks later, I’m still parsing its ideas about nature and industry, fashion and adornment, deep time and capitalism, beauty and power.  

You can find more content from the exhibition here.

Graeme Patterson, “Player Piano Waltz,” 7ft H x 5ft W x 4ft L. Working player piano, wood, mixed materials, video/audio components.

Editor’s note: This article originally ran in the Summer 2014 Edition of Visual Arts News.  Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel is on view at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery February 14-April 12, 2015. 

Enter into the imaginary world of Graeme Patterson’s Secret Citadel where memory, invention, and fantasy collide to provoke a multifaceted narrative of childhood friendship, rights of passage and adult isolation. Conveying a much more personal psychology than the social resonance of his iconic Woodrow (2007)—a multimedia installation inspired by his family’s Saskatchewan homestead—Patterson’s Secret Citadel reveals the breadth of his creativity and the complexity of his imagination. It is an ambitious exhibition that integrates sculpture, animation, robotics, music and video projections with humour, insight and melancholy.

Patterson admits the subjective nature of this work as an incarnation of his memories and imaginings of a lost childhood friendship and male friendships in general; and he chooses two animal avatars, a sprightly blue bison as himself and an energetic orange cougar as his childhood friend Yuki to guide our way through his tale. The transmutable nature of these avatars invites the viewer to imagine or remember our own childhood adventures and turning points as we assume the role of one or the other of the characters.

Although natural enemies in the wild, this unlikely pair form the binding link between the four sculptures, which allude to four pivotal scenes in their relationship. The bison and cougar appear in various incarnations throughout, from lifeless costume hides suspended mid-air to bouncing animated video projections. These two characters begin as whimsical compatriots and end as somewhat maudlin loners; their transformation underscores the vagaries of a life and implies a rather pessimistic depiction of growing up and becoming an adult.

Patterson’s trademark model making skills are as fastidious in their detail as his earlier work, but there is a noticeable difference in their materiality and tone. Almost a boyish creativity is evident in paperclip hinges, toothpick furniture and blanket fort mountains, which evoke childhood and adolescent pastimes. Except for in his Player Piano Waltz (2013), which retains a detached coolness and finesse. Not surprisingly, Player Piano Waltz references the last scene, where the bison and cougar are solitary adults wandering aimlessly through the rooms of a fading gentleman’s club.

Once again as in Woodrow, the model is meticulously constructed and void of any three dimensional characters within the space itself. Instead the set integrates the narrative through looped animated projections viewed through the external windowed walls of the club. The viewer is held at bay, unless a coin is dropped into the pay box to initiate the musical score of the player piano, which serves as the base for the sculpture. Patterson also wrote the lilting music reminiscent of early Tom Waits.

In the three other sculptures, Patterson moves away from the self-contained voyeuristic miniature style of Woodrow towards a more openly inviting physicality of space. Grudge Match (2013) allows viewers to choose a team and sit on their side of wooden gymnasium bleachers to watch the animated high school wrestling match projected onto the wall. Patterson’s style of stop-motion animation integrates detailed homemade puppets and sets with sophisticated digital projections to create a quirky hybrid throw back to 1960s cartoons like Davey and Goliath or the Thunderbirds.

The gymnasium stage for the animated wrestling match sits under and behind the bleachers, and includes two drawer-like attachments of a locker room and washroom alongside a weight room and coach’s office. It almost feels like a giant Barbie palace for boys that could be folded up and set up in your bedroom. Despite the playful elements, competition is the focus of this high school match, where potential alpha status is declared and clique alignments develop. Grudge Match severs the common bond of imaginative play and adventure evident in The Mountain (2013) and Camp Wakonda (2013).

Camp Wakonda (2013) is a haunting installation featuring two charred bunk beds as the platform for a reconstructed summer camp and vehicular accident. It links the structured independence of camp with the freedom of a driver’s license as complex rites of passage. Each rite carries its own inherent danger, but is an essential step in personal character development. Manly adult skills such as archery and wood chopping are practiced and tested in projected animations onto the top bunks’ replicas of the open framed camp buildings—while the lower bunks’ projections find our protagonists locked in a battle within, as the civilized avatar fights off its wild counterpart. It is a layered and complicated narrative that culminates in the final collision between childhood and adolescence portrayed in the flaming accident between school bus and family sedan.

Graeme Patterson, “Camp Wakonda” 6ft H x 10ft W x 7ft L. Wood fabric, mixed material, video/audio components.

The story begins, however, with The Mountain (2012), a massive sculptural installation with a white blanket covered mountain cloaking the ideal artist’s studio within. Two suburban family homes straddle either side of mountain linked by telephone poles that stretch over the top of the mountain and a secret passage tunnel that runs underneath the dining room table base. One house has its furniture neatly stacked outside indicating either a move in or out of the neighbourhood, simultaneously bringing the friends together and tearing them apart. The mountain’s physical inference to a blanket fort with imagined secret passageways connects the imaginative play of childhood to the imaginative play of an artist. It’s possible to envision the young buffalo and cougar running over to share their latest comics and practice their super hero moves.

Patterson seamlessly relates these childhood pastimes to his secret artist’s studio deep within the mountain, which evidently refers to Superman’s “Secret Citadel”—the earliest comic book version of his “Fortress of Solitude”—where Superman would go to contemplate and rejuvenate after saving the world. Of all the sculptural works, The Mountain is the most joyful, perhaps because it reflects the artist’s studio practice. A practice that is connected to the creative abandon of childhood rather than the dismal boredom of a gentleman’s club.

Interspersed between these four works are wall projections that fill out the narrative of the bison and cougar. Patterson includes an array of technical styles. Some are live action models dressed in the bison or cougar costumes, and others involve his puppetry. All are relatively short loops that can be caught between viewing the sculptures to add another layer of insight and detail. But one must not miss the Secret Citadel (2013), a thirty-minute stop motion animation that tells the unabridged story of bison and cougar, and showcases Patterson’s considerable animation skills. It’s a visual and aural delight. Patterson is an artist with a substantial range of technical accomplishment, but he seems to hold animation with a particular affection.

After watching Secret Citadel, the rest of the exhibition shifted context. Initially, the sculptures stood independently as sculptures, yet afterwards they evolved into elaborate sets for the animation. Not that one category holds more value; rather one reveals a lingering childhood fascination with Saturday mornings.

Peter Cunningham, GM 1936 &1949, Dead Reckoning, 2012. Sanded fiberglass side of land-dry lobster boat.

I pulled up to the Grand Manan Island Art Gallery on my way to Deep Cove for another swim in the Bay of Fundy. I’ve braved the foot-numbing surf for the past two days, and my legs are itchy from yesterday’s salt.

Shutting off the tremulous twang of Wilf Carter on the car’s cassette stereo, there’s just the rustle of trees, crickets and light flapping of flags. Looking out from the steps of the gallery, the blue of the high tide around Castalia is so perfect it’s painful to remember once you’ve left it.

It’s late August, and I’m on my third annual retreat to Grand Manan for the Island Folk Festival. A highlight of my year.

I spent the afternoon the day before at a songwriter’s circle at the Sardine Museum & Herring Hall of Fame. Their voices echoed up the vaulting roof of the old smoking house like a school of ghosts from a million dried herring. Of course, only a visitor could see things so. Year-round life here is something else. Fog doesn’t come on little cat feet—it smothers in like an over-cologned man on a bus.

But what does the romantic visitor bring to such worlds? This is the question any artist tackles as soon as they attempt to aesthetically manifest the mundane. And it’s at the heart of Jaune Evans’ Collecting Fog and Peter Cunningham’s Dead Reckoning, which were on display from Aug. 18-29, 2012, at the gallery.

Evans first exhibited the show in 2011 at the Thoreau Centre in the Presido, in San Francisco, where she lives. With an international career in public health, fine art, literature, environmental protection and human rights, Evans’ attachment to Grand Manan is personal.

Evans’ ex-husband, Peter Cunningham, a leading New York City- based photographer, is the son of the man known as The Fog Seeker, Bob Cunningham. A cloud physicist born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1919, Bob began taking twice-daily weather observations when he was 10. In high school, he spent his first summer at Bowdoin Kent Island Scientific Station, nine kilometres south of Grand Manan.

He spent nearly every summer for the next 60 years visiting the islands, Peter and family in tow, collecting fog in jars and keeping his observations. His island was one of keen scientific rigour, daily measurements meticulously kept on charted paper.

A reporter with The Boston Globe in 2001 asked Bob if he had found anything stunning about fog in his six decades of study. Bob smiled and replied, “not really.”

Following Bob’s death in 2008, Evans put together Collecting Fog, an exhibit alternating between 18 photographs by Evans and text about Bob, his studies and the Island’s fog. Bob may not have found anything stunning about fog, but there is plenty stunning about him. Evans’ work parts the fog of time to reveal his incredible adventure, while preserving it like all those jars of fog Bob kept in his cellar.

But this is also a man who flew the world over in a giant C-130 military transport aircraft doing basic and applied research in cloud physics and radar propagation. It is impossible to capture such grandiose vitality. Like fog, it can be bottled, but those drops of water couldn’t be mistaken for the real thing.

And so it is with Collecting Fog and Peter Cunningham’s Dead Reckoning, Stories From Grand Manan, a series of photographs and reflections of the island by Peter and collected in a book of the same name. Both artists grapple with the same problem, like Peter Pan chasing his shadow. And each succeeds not because their representations encapsulate the ephemeral every day, but—like the wisdom of Collecting Fog’s epigraph imparts, “From wonder into wonder, existence opens (Lao Tzu)”—because each of their attempts, which is really what was on display in the shows, indeed does just that.

So, within a week of returning back to the mainland, I bought my first can of sardines. I couldn’t look at what I was eating, but I ate every bite, trying to forget the tiny bones, letting the greasy oil sop my fingers and roll down my chin, embracing the wonder of existence.