I feel blessed to have been connected to the Gardiner Museum for a number of years now. I’ve had items in their shop on and off, and last year they asked me to teach a tile-making class that went really well. The connection with this museum/gallery has given me a lot of confidence in my ceramics work. They asked me about a month ago if I would be interested in participating in a pop-up show at the Ingram Gallery in Yorkville. It was short notice, but when the Gardiner asks anything of me I try to always say yes!
The theme is icicles they told me.
Icicles.
Hmmmm….it hadn’t even snowed yet.
I needed to work quickly, but mindfully. I began my process by making curly porcelain icicles. Then I read about how icicles form from snowflakes. I was searching for that elusive feeling….the inspiration, that spark, the spring board, that exciting place where I feel ready to begin.
I sat in the studio and I was reminiscing on how I got here. The Ingram Gallery feels like the pinnacle of my art career so far, honestly.
In 2019, I’d reconnected with Adeline from the Gardiner Museum at the Toronto Interior Design show. I had just launched my tile-making business and had a beautiful booth set up with all my mosaic tiles. She had come around the corner and I heard her familiar warm voice, “Meg?! Is this what you’re doing now?!”
She loved the trumpeter swans in particular.
That thought inspired me.
You say icicles, I think winter, I think winter, I think of our trumpeter swans here where I live at the narrows.
The resident swan family these days is led by a tagged swan named X34. He and his mate are tough, urban swans. They live in our narrows between Lake Simcoe and Lake Couchiching. It’s a part of the Trent-Severn Waterway…..there are some naturalized areas, but it’s a virtual boat highway in the spring/summer and every year this swan and his lifelong mate navigate a huge brood of babies (cygnets) here. Most swans that reside near here go farther north to raise their families and return to the open waters of our area every winter.
Not X34.
He has his babies here in the marshes of the narrows and they stay through all the seasons. In the spring the parents will tell their grown cygnets that it’s time to go off on their own and the parents will begin the process all over again. The tiny rosebuds in this mosaic piece represent the 8 cygnets in the family this year.
I love how, with the help of kind and dedicated humans, the trumpeter swans have triumphed over near extinction in Ontario.
This swan in particular, X34, he shows me what resiliency is.
I look for his family every day on my way to work, to see if all 8 babies have survived, and to see if they are still in their new favourite spot down by the willow tree in the shallow bay. I have seen the cygnets each year grow from tiny fluffy chics to tan-coloured teenagers, to fully grown white beauties.
When they fly over my house honking I feel grateful to live here in this place.
They also make winters magical for me.
X34, thank you for your inspiration.
Please join me if you can at the Ingram Gallery for the opening on December 14, or stop in to see the show between December 11 and January 14, 2025
xx Meg
