Clay Holds What Bodies Remember

This fall, the Gardiner Museum, in collaboration with Black Artists’ Networks in Dialogue, opens After the Island: Caribbean Canadian Ceramics Four artists: PJ Anderson, Eddy Firmin, Manuel Mathieu, and Sharon Norwood, use clay to hold what the official record tried to erase.

From October 9th, 2026 through April 25th, 2027, these makers turn vessels, punching bags, bricks, and scent into evidence. They refuse the polite version of diaspora. They insist that the body is an archive and clay is the only material honest enough to keep the receipts.

Artist: Eddy Firmin

Eddy Firmin, born in Guadeloupe and moving between Quebec and Nova Scotia, puts the inheritance of colonial and indentured labour right in your face. His Punching X installation hangs ceramic bags with human features (his own and his daughter’s) on one side, decorative flowers on the other. When you approach, they turn. Your body has to decide whether it anticipates the blow or absorbs it. Then he goes further: a video-game-style installation where you navigate a life-sized digital rendering of his body with a joystick, uncovering African diaspora stories while two ceramic sculptures sit in the gallery like physical anchors. The boundary between screen and flesh, viewer and viewed, dissolves. Eddy understands that trauma and resistance live in the posture of the living.

Artist: PJ Anderson

PJ Anderson works the same material from a different angle; protection. Drawing on her Afro-Jamaican and Red River Métis heritage, she makes clay into armour and container at once. Her Claw Forms look like weapons and extensions of the body, part science fiction, part ancestral defence. Larger smoke-fired vessels wear beads and jewels, moving between vessel, sculpture, and embodied presence. She coils and burnishes using techniques studied in South Africa and the American Southwest, folding multiple cultural lineages into forms that refuse to choose one history over another. PJ’s work asks a question many of us carry quietly; how do you protect what still needs to grow?

Artist: Manuel Mathieu

Manuel Mathieu, Haitian Canadian and based in Montreal, expands the conversation beyond sight. In Shhrine, he builds a permeable shelter of metal, canvas, and ceramic that includes scent, the sense that can trigger memory before consciousness has a chance to filter it. Burned canvas, an open structure, a central form that evokes a spine. Visitors step inside. The work is both refuge and exposure, protective and vulnerable at the same time. Nearby, mixed-media wall sculptures and large paintings like Genocide II and Apparition Nocturnal: Hamac continue the inquiry into memory and loss. Manuel shows that ceramics  can hold ritual, space, and the body’s relationship to both.

Artist: Sharon Norwood

Then there is Sharon Norwood, Jamaican-born, who turns the domestic interior into a site of interrogation. She salvages Savannah Grey bricks (made by the labour of enslaved people, some still bearing the impressions of hands and fingers) and treats those traces as an alternative archive. Whose labour built the house of refinement? What might those makers have created if they had been free to choose? Her installations mix wallpaper, glazed bricks, ceramic pineapples, plates, drawings, and an unruly tablescape that refuses the polite dining room. Running through everything is her signature curly line, inspired by the curl and kink of African hair. It knots, overlaps, and refuses containment. It marks presence on objects historically associated with European elegance and forces the viewer to see the unseen labour underneath.

Together these four artists make visible the forces that shape bodies, objects, and the worlds they inhabit. Clay carries labour, ritual, displacement, and the cultural continuities that refuse to die across generations and geographies. Co-curators Dr. Sequoia Miller and Joséphine Denis understand this. They know clay holds the trace of touch, pressure, and transformation. They know Canadian voices can speak to Caribbean legacies without flattening either.

 This is influence through empathy, making the viewer feel the weight of inheritance in their own hands. Most people cannot hold complexity; they need the concrete, the sensory, the sticky idea that stays after the gallery lights dim. After the Island gives them that. It primes the body first, then invites the mind to catch up.

Go. Stand in front of the work. Let it look back at you. The clay already knows what your body is still learning to say.