Keira McArthur

J.S. Maier Company, porcelain makers In a small village in northern Bohemia where there are large deposits of kaolin a porcelain factory is built by three merchant partners, in 1890. Shares in the company are passed down to sons and daughters through three generations, who manage the factory and sell porcelain wares throughout Europe, Russia […]

I was seventeen; what did I know? In my own mind, very very little. And yet, astonishing things happened that still echo across forty years. We compare notes, my old friends and I, just recently re-connected after decades of life and distance. I’m fascinated by the fragments of us that have shown up on the […]

5am mid February, 1.25 hours from the Canadian-US border. Early early pre-dawn sky looks like a dull ultramarine red, slightly warmer and washed out along the eastern horizon. At the corresponding time in the evening – post sunset, the sky is deep intense indigo, flecked with the one or two stars strong enough to shine […]

Roni Horn and Michel Leiris are my companions through this second lockdown. They deepen and widen my curious. “In any encounter with her art the feeling that what one is seeing is not necessarily what one thinks one is seeing leads to a heightened sensory experience and turns into a discovery, an adventure.” Exhibition magazine, […]

What would you choose? Opinions like these can be written onto a piece of paper and stuffed into a bottle for tossing into the ocean, or yelled through a global-sized megaphone of a social media account or transmuted into art or music or a story about people and their mad maneuverings for influence, …then dissolved […]

It’s taken me five hours to find the inner stillness required to properly enjoy a pot of tea, damnit. Twitchy, grumpy and unsettled since Tuesday evening. Yesterday I went to bed at 7pm and rose at 1:30am of course, doing my best to find serenity* while writing and drinking coffee. At 6am I took myself […]

A tradition when moving into a new space is to go to the closest Walmart and find something living in the plant section that I can rescue. This was the living green thing I found in a shoved together stack of ‘special buy’ tropicals in the middle of a box store aisle in March 2019. […]

I wonder. As this Hamilton residency approaches its third year in March I can see the times my ego has stepped forward to protect me – from change, from expansion, from my own decision to grow as an artist, evolve as a person. From connection. I felt profound relief when we first began self-isolation. That […]

My favourite teacup is made of fine bone china. I was offered it as thanks for playing at a church fundraiser many years ago, but not until this year of coVid isolation have I understood what it’s for – I’ve only just learned to drink tea. This cup in particular demands a certain level of […]

Some days I wake up into where I am as though I’ve never noticed before how truly lovely it is. At the moment it’s here where I come for first pre-dawn coffee, where I take note of the morning sky, the quality of first light. Here where the tone of my day is set. This […]

This rain’s falling hard, straight down. Even so, there’s a reassuring line of red sunfire on the horizon just now; the sun rises warm above bruised clouds. I’ve been sifting through headlines to check the people barometer, which reads just like the morning sky: heavy and bruised with some pockets of humour (a photoshopped Rudy […]

Snow in the skies today, first time this fall. I’m reminded of every other first snows I’ve experienced, how watching the way the flakes move makes the wind visible, like magic. A grin that begins in my belly. Then watching, still in all the swirling: here we go, into Winter. I was born into these […]