Exhibitions > Archive

Maura Doyle: the Vessel, that with fugitive Articulation answer’d, how deep is your love?

May 2 - August 28, 2016

How do we know a pot?

Expanding upon her ongoing interest in the form and history of the pot, Maura Doyle considers the vessel, a hollow form with a hole, and how we come to know it through interaction and use, representation, and museum display.

Rich in metaphor, pots have been written about by poets and writers for thousands of years, including Persian poet Omar Khayyam, whose translated The Rubaiyat (1120A.C.E.) inspires the exhibition’s title.

Doyle considers the making of pots as a collaborative effort between the pot, the potter, and over ten thousand years of history.

To consider these relationships further, she selected a number of Mesoamerican pots from Carleton University’s collection and over repeated visits communed with them, meditating with a focus on a single sense (sight, touch and sound) for each sitting.

Maura Doyle is the third artist to be featured in the Collection Invitational series. The series creates artist-led, open-ended opportunities to research and activate the collection through a week-long research residency at CUAG and subsequent exhibition. It stimulates the production of new artworks and fresh ways of seeing and thinking about the Carleton University collection.

This exhibition won the “Innovation in Collection-Based Exhibition” award at the 40th annual Ontario Association of Art Galleries Awards in Toronto (2017).