Yellowknife artist Maura Meng says some of her newest exhibition at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre amounts to a visual representation of her emotions.
The exhibit includes about 200 ceramic hands appearing to emerge from the gallery’s walls, pieces she “hustled” to create over the course of about a year.
They are made from clay that Meng dug out of the ground around Yellowknife and fired in a wood kiln.
“I start by building a hand out of clay, then I make a mold of the hand, and then I cast the hand with the local mud,” said Meng.
“It’s very labour intensive and there’s a lot of little steps that go along with it, but I just got it in my head that I was going to do this, and then I did it.”
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
The exhibit includes a series of masks that Meng said she used to explore her emotional states.
Meng, who spoke to Cabin Radio while attending an artists’ residency in Medicine Hat, Alberta, said it was important for this work to first be shown locally.
“If I’m working here then I should be showing here too,” said Meng. “The museum looked like an ideal space to do that.”
She said she designed the exhibition to be readily accommodated inside the territorial capital’s Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, where there is limited floor space but an abundance of wall space.
Advertisement.
Advertisement.
Meng moved to the Northwest Territories in 2014, a press release about the exhibition said. She first began creating functional pottery before shifting to sculpture to allow for more intuitive exploration and more complex ideas.
Offering a word of advice to other artists and creatives, she said it’s important for them to be persistent with their efforts.
“The most important thing is that you just keep exploring your ideas and work from your inspiration,” said Meng.
“There’s still a lot of things that happen – you have an idea and you try and find support for the idea, and some things work out, and some things just don’t work out – but you have to keep going anyway.”
The exhibition, titled Unearthed, will be on display in the museum’s Mezzanine Art Gallery until May 2026.
Jasmine Nasogaluak contributed reporting.
Related Articles